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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27908275">Almost Eurydice</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Lake_King/pseuds/The_Lake_King'>The_Lake_King</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Downton Abbey</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Falling In Love, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Inspired by Orpheus and Eurydice (Ancient Greek Religion &amp; Lore), Love Confessions, M/M, Mild Gore, Music, POV Jimmy, Period-Typical Homophobia, References to Ancient Greek Religion &amp; Lore, Self-Hatred, Suicide, That last one is for Anstruther</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 18:35:20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>25,963</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27908275</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Lake_King/pseuds/The_Lake_King</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Thomas was gone. Jimmy followed. Based on Orpheus and Eurydice.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Thomas Barrow/Jimmy Kent</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>80</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>119</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Thomas' Song</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I don't know how I've missed a brilliant musical based on one of my favourite myths for this long, but I just got introduced to Hadestown and this nonsense happened. This one is going to get pretty heavy, so proceed with caution.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Jimmy sat at the piano in the empty club, running his fingers idly over the keys. He was stuck. Of course, the one night that he had the time and energy to work on his song was the night when nothing worked. Bloody typical, was what it was. Why couldn’t inspiration come at a good moment? Why did it like forcing him out of bed at some ungodly hour to scribble down a half-remembered melody before it blew away like so much sleep-sand in his eyes?</p><p>The music had first come, unbidden, just before he went in for his interview at Downton. He was still proud of how he had charmed his way through with half his mind on the fleeting melody that had crawled up the back of his skull and made a nest. It was quite uninvited, thank you very much. He had never been <em>that</em> good at composition, so he supposed at first it was someone else’s work that he was recycling in his mind, tweaked a bit and misremembered. If only he could find the original, it would scratch this strange itch that kept him up at night. Yes, that must be it. He spent far too much of his meagre free time combing through sheet music and records, trying to find the illusive tune. He came close to playing what he had so far for the girls and asking them what it was, not knowing whether an exclamation of ‘oh, that’s –’ would bring relief or devastation. So close, he opened his mouth to ask Ivy. So close, his hands were arranged on the first chord. <em>Wrong time, wrong place</em>, his brain insisted. <em>Wrong person.</em> He reasoned that he didn’t have enough to go on, unsure even how that very first phrase was supposed to end.</p><p>It came in the night, when he dreamt of soft, cigarette-scented lips. But then he wasn’t dreaming anymore. He still wrote it all down feverishly after chasing Mr. Barrow from his room. It was the last time anything would come to him for a year, but the notes he had so far never went away. They played on a loop, wearing down a path, etching themselves into his heart like the river carves out the canyon. The unfinished-ness of it was maddening, this waiting for a resolution that wouldn’t come. Jimmy had a surly streak already, but the business with Barrow and this damned music in his head wore him thin. He knew he was getting on the wrong side of people. He knew that he would pay for it someday. But then there was a split-lipped smile, another line of music, a breaking of the pressure behind his eyes like the thunderclap on a tense and muggy day. Best try not to think about what the downpour means.</p><p>He wasn’t sure when it happened. A few notes became a proper tune, a melody, a movement of some larger symphony. He wasn’t sure when an uneasy friendship born out of guilt became something warm and close and comfortable. When the knowledge of who Jimmy Kent was, is, and ought to be became three different things. When the music in him went from <em>the</em> song to <em>my </em>song to Thomas’ Song. He was completely sure of when he realized there was nothing to be done about it; no drink, no bar-fight pain, no woman to <em>fix</em> this thing inside him. It was as soon as he shut the door of the guest bedroom, while the only person who could ever see and hear him stood in the hall.  </p><p>Perhaps if he had played an imperfect version, spat out all the nonsense in his head there and then, he would be able to finish it, to say what he needed to say. But no. Thomas belonged at Downton, as if he were one of the very foundation stones. Thomas was a fact of that house. And Jimmy was a coward. He couldn’t bear to demand ‘run away with me to nowhere with nothing’ after betraying both of them like that. He had nothing to give except his music, his one song. So he worked, and he wrote to Thomas in poor, sporadic letters. One day soon, he would fix it. He would go and he would play and he would chase off that little shite Andy that Thomas kept mentioning because the music would say all the things that refused to come out of his pen. But he couldn’t get it right. It was finished, after a fashion. Almost-right. Just something off, something a bit to the left of where it should be that he couldn’t put his finger on. Something about the ending. God damn it. He shoved the music sheets into his bag. He hardly needed them anymore, but he carried them about with him anyway like a talisman. Some proof that he really did write this bloody gorgeous piece of music for Thomas bloody Barrow.</p><p>The sun was coming up over London as he left the club, painting the city in harsh relief. The good citizens were waking up, getting ready to face another day while the creatures of the night like Jimmy slunk off to their dens. After an early life in service, there was something oddly decadent about waking up in the afternoon, even though he probably got the same amount of sleep. Tending bar and playing the piano for a living was more fun, though. The city was properly awake by the time Jimmy reached his boarding house, properly knackered and disappointed in himself. He perked up when he saw a thick, cream envelope shoved in his cubby with a copy of <em>The Strand</em>. Grinning, he snatched up his prizes and jogged up the stairs to his room, making no effort to be quiet.</p><p>Thomas always sent his correspondence on the best paper. Stolen, most likely. Though a small, ugly part of Jimmy crowed that Thomas went out and bought stupidly expensive stationary just for him. Jimmy pressed his nose to the inside when he ripped it open, soaking himself in the smell of cigarettes, pomade and clean laundry for a moment before even glancing at the lines of tight, messier-than-usual cursive.</p><p>
  <em>My dear Jimmy,</em>
</p><p>That was new. He was usually just <em>Dear Jimmy</em>, or occasionally <em>Jimmy</em>. On one memorable occasion he was <em>You little shit</em>. Maybe he could get away with a <em>Dearest Thomas</em> next time.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>My dear Jimmy,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I’m sorry for my late reply, I haven’t really known what to say. Fancy that, me running out of things to tell you about Downton. The thing is, I haven’t got long here. No one has an under butler anymore apparently, not even Lord Grantham. It’s hard to keep up on the gossip for you when all the gossip is about how I’m being pushed out. I know that’s what I would be gleefully hissing about if it were anyone else.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I miss you. Soppy, I know. I miss the way we laughed together. I even miss that horseshit you used to get up to with Alfred and Ivy. You’re all gone now, except Daisy. The piano misses you, too. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>The truth is, I put off writing because I hoped to be able to tell you that I’ve found a new job and to write me at such-and-such an address. No such luck. It seems that the world’s moved on, and I missed it somehow. I’m as much of a relic as Carson, only I would have years and decades to fill up before I get to drop dead in the dining room. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>If you were to go back in time and ask me whether I reckoned anyone would be sad when I go, I wouldn’t hesitate to answer: ‘absolutely bloody not.’ I probably would’ve laughed at the idea. Knowing that they’ll all do their best to forget me the second I’m gone has no right to hurt like it does. It shouldn’t. I don’t know how to explain it to you, Jimmy, but I’ve had this premonition since before the war that I would die in this house. I know it’s mad, but I just have. I know I can’t leave. As much as I hate it here, I feel like I can never leave. Maybe I’ve gone completely round the bend. Sometimes it seems like that. Like I’m the only real person stuck in this mad manners-comedy puppet show. Isn’t that what insane people think: that everyone else is barmy?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Forgive me, I didn’t mean to get so maudlin, but I don’t know what to cross out and what to put in place. Are you getting anywhere with your mystery scribbles? I wish you would have let me hear them. Play them for me, will you, just once? You sounded sad in your last letter. I hope that you are happier now. Or that you will be soon, anyway.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>On reading this back I sound like an absolute tit. But I can sound like a tit to you, I know you’ll forgive me that much. I hope you forgive me everything else, because I am so, so sorry. I don’t want you to ever feel bad or be unhappy because of me. Please play your song for someone. I know in my heart it’ll be a good one.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Love always,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>T.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>Jimmy sucked in his breath and forgot to let it out again before the blood started ringing in his ears. Nothing was real. The world was cracking open and nothing was real. It was wrong. Wrong and awful and impossible and—</p><p>He didn’t realize he was packing a bag until he did up the clasps. He shoved Thomas’ letter in his pocket and thundered down the stairs, telling one of his house mates to piss off for saying something about banging up and down at all hours without registering which one it was. He had to go, had to fix it, had to find Thomas before—</p><p>His landlady’s daughter answered the door. She was a cute little thing, pretty in a childish sort of way while holding a smirk that told you she was anything but. Exactly what he would have gone for, once.</p><p>“Oh, hello Jimmy, I—”</p><p>“You have a phone in here, yeah? I need to use it.”</p><p>“Jimmy—”</p><p>“It’s an emergency!” He bowled past her.</p><p>He connected to Yorkshire, tapping out his song, <em>Thomas’ Song</em>, against the wall and praying to a God he wasn’t sure he believed in.</p><p>“Downton Abbey, this is Mr. Carson, the butler, speaking.”</p><p>“I need to speak to Mr. Barrow. Right now.”</p><p>“Who is this, please?”</p><p>“Doesn’t matter, I need to speak to Mr. Barrow—”</p><p>“James?”</p><p>“Listen—”</p><p>“You have a great deal of nerve calling here. Mr. Barrow may speak to you on his own time, and ideally <em>far</em> from my office. Good day, James.”</p><p>“No! You don’t understand, he’s—”</p><p>“I said good day, James.”</p><p>The line went dead.</p><p>“Fuck!” He slammed his hand into the wall hard enough to crack the plaster. The women were screaming but he didn’t care. He barely heard them. “Fucking miserable—bastard…Bastards!” He scooped up his bag and ran. He tripped and fell twice before he reached the station.</p><p>What had Thomas said? He was the only real person in this sea of puppets. He wanted to scream at everyone while he waited in line, tapping his feet and gasping for air, fielding odd looks from all these people going about their ordinary little lives, oblivious to Jimmy’s world ending. Their worlds were spinning along just fine, and The World went on without him. He had never felt so horribly, horribly small.</p><p>“Wait for me,” he whispered. “Wait for me, please. I’m coming.”</p><p>It occurred to him, distantly, abstractly, that he might be overreacting. His heart squashed that thought. There was no room for that notion when instead of a simple ‘Your friend’ or ‘Best’ there was a ‘Love always.’ <em>Love always. I love you always. I never stopped loving you. I’m sorry, and I know we’re not supposed to talk about it, but I need to tell you that I never stopped loving you because it’s the last thing I’ll ever</em>—</p><p>He bought his third-class ticket and ran to the platform, even though his train wasn’t due for half and hour. Half an hour was entirely too long. How long had Thomas been so low? How had it not come across? Had it, and he was just too blind to see? He tried to think through Thomas’ most recent letters, but the words blurred together, replaced by a steady beat of <em>I would die in this house…I know I can’t leave.</em> Was that what he meant when he said he was sick? Jimmy had been worried that it meant his hand was deteriorating. It had never occurred to him that it might be Thomas’ mind that was the problem. The under butler had told him once that he reckoned the house ate people. Some were able to dance across its lips in a brief dalliance, others had already been thoroughly digested by the time anyone noticed something amiss. Jimmy had thought it morbid, but had a grand old time making jokes about Carson being digested.</p><p>“And what about you, Mr. Barrow? Are you digested?” <em>Say no. </em></p><p>“Nah, not yet. Definitely been chewed, though.”</p><p>Chewed. Swallowed. And now it was trying to spit him back up and send him away with the rubbish. <em>I’ve had this premonition since before the war…</em> Jimmy wanted to scream. He was weeping by the time his train arrived. <em>Since before the war…</em> The entire time he’d known him. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right that Thomas should be walking around with these stones in his pockets, while Jimmy hopped along beside him, stealing his cigarettes. But he was going to make it right. Even though he had his own stones in his own pockets that he had never divulged. They could offload the lot of them, trade them like marbles. Share the weight. He would make it right. He had to make it right.</p><p>“Wait for me, wait for me, wait for me,” Jimmy muttered under his breath, in time with the wheels when the engine started up. <em>Too late, too little, too late,</em> the train chugged back.   </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Where a Greater Man Failed</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Please mind the tags and the myth that we're in. I apologize for what I'm 'bout to do.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They were always busy. Under butlers didn’t just get days off. Club musicians knew better than to take them, unless they wanted that East End lummox Bill to usurp them as official piano man. The trip from London to Downton took hours. Or, when there had been bloody stupid, nerve-wracking, unacceptable delays, it took most of the day. There was no time, not for either of them. If there had been, this is what it might have looked like: Jimmy hitching a ride with a farmer, Thomas waiting in the big house. Only Jimmy wouldn’t still be in yesterday’s work clothes, white-knuckled on the side of the cart. He would be grinning and lounging like a cat in the sun, the way that never failed to make Thomas’ careful grey eyes give him a once-over. Thomas would meet him in the yard, smoking like there was a camera nearby, the way that never failed to make Jimmy’s stomach flip. Jimmy would wave, Thomas would make some witty comment, all while smiling his secret smile that was only for the ex-footman. It would be perfect.</p>
<p>Jimmy fancied for a moment, as he jumped off the cart with stuttered thanks, that Thomas was right there in his usual spot. He would step forward, ashing his cigarette, saying “Jimmy? Blimey, you look awful. I never meant to worry you an’ all, I was a bit drunk when I wrote that. Havin’ a bad day, you know how it is.”</p>
<p>The yard was empty. Only a long shadow from some crates loomed against the wall in the afternoon sun. Jimmy took a deep breath and opened the door.</p>
<p>He had walked this way so many times before. He knew the creaking boards of the passage, the squeak of the door. Whispers came from the servants’ hall. A nameless maid floated past him like a ghost. “Are you with the police?” she asked. Jimmy ignored her. He wasn’t sure she was real.</p>
<p>Mrs. Hughes was real. For the life of him he couldn’t think of her as Mrs. Carson. She stood at the base of the stairs, her heel still perched on the bottom step. There was no colour in her face and strands of hair had escaped her usually immaculate knot. She seemed like the calm before the storm. Jimmy knew that look, knew it from his own face in the mirror. Tears hadn’t come yet, but they would. Enough to drown in.</p>
<p>“Where is he?” The sound came from his lips, but it was foreign. He was being operated from a distance like a ventriloquist’s dummy.</p>
<p>“Jimmy,” her face crumpled in on itself. “He’s…he’s gone, Jimmy.”</p>
<p>“Where is he?” he repeated woodenly.</p>
<p>She said nothing. There were people behind him, milling about, whispering, reaching out to him. He slapped an ownerless hand away.</p>
<p>“Is he up there?” he asked.</p>
<p>“Yes, but—”</p>
<p>Jimmy pushed past her, unhearing. The stairs squeaked and groaned and grumbled under his feet, unnaturally loud in the stillness of the house. His feet knew the way, even if his soul had been left behind in the yard. They knew how many steps there were between landings, how many steps to Thomas’ door. The only real door. The only one with anything important behind it. The rest were painted on for show, like a set for a play. Permanently shut, permanently mysterious for there was nothing about them to be solved. Thomas’ door stood open. It always had.</p>
<p>“We are very discreet,” a woman was saying. “He can’t be buried with the church, of course…”</p>
<p>“I don’t imagine he would much care about that sort of thing.” That was Dr. Clarkson, tired and shaken. He stood near the doorway, obstructing Jimmy’s view of the bed. There was blood on his sleeve.</p>
<p>“As tragic as this is,” Carson blustered, “I must emphasize the need to avoid scandal—”</p>
<p>“Oh yes, <em>God forbid</em> there should be a <em>scandal</em>!” Baxter shouted. Jimmy had never heard her shout. Good, he thought. It was good that someone was crying and screaming and rending garments. Someone cared other than—</p>
<p>“James, isn’t it?” Clarkson had magically zipped through time and space and stood beside him, a gentle grip at his elbow. “Would you like a moment alone, son?”</p>
<p>Jimmy nodded. The others filed past him, Carson muttering, Baxter weeping, the other woman <em>smirking</em>, Jimmy was sure of it, despite never looking at her face.</p>
<p>“You don’t mind waiting, of course, ma’am?”</p>
<p>“Certainly not. Unlike you, Dr. Clarkson, I have all day. And all the days thereafter.” She shut the door behind her with a snap.</p>
<p>Jimmy stared at the floorboards. There was a little dust bunny at the foot of the bed, bound together by a couple black hairs. He was intimately familiar with this stretch of floor. He had stood, sat, lounged on it, talking or playing cards in the night. It was different now. Colder. Something had sucked all the air out of the room, and now it was reaching into his lungs for more. He raised his eyes to the bed.</p>
<p>Thomas didn’t look like he was sleeping. Dead men never do. There is an absence about them; a lack. Thomas lacked. He lacked the slight colour that illuminated his cheekbones, that made his ivory skin ethereal rather than sickly. He lacked his neatness, his order, but also the action and vigour of his disheveled moments. It was so incongruous that Jimmy almost fetched a comb. Instead he sat on the too-small mattress and brushed back that dark hair with his fingers. He let his hand wander down the side of his face, the skin cool and dry, roughened a little by stubble. He traced Thomas’ lips, bloodless and sans pout. They would never again arrange themselves into that little moue of contempt, never smile or hold a cigarette or kiss a man. It was wrong. So, so wrong. Jimmy felt as though he were watching a film of himself, far away, in a world just slightly to the left of where it should be. In the right world, Thomas was alright. The make-shift bandages at his wrists hadn’t been in vain and Jimmy…Jimmy hadn’t been too little, too late.</p>
<p>He didn’t realize he was crying until he shook with it. He clutched at all that remained of Thomas, his wonderful, awful, clever, stupid, funny, tragic Thomas. “I’m sorry,” he whispered between sobs, “I’m so sorry, darlin’. I’d do anything, anything…” He pressed his forehead to Thomas’, letting his tears fall onto the other man’s half-closed eyelids, where they clung to the tops of his lashes. There, strangely, they no longer looked like tears. They could be the remains of snowflakes, of frozen breath whuffed out from behind a scarf, clinging to dark hair and sparkling like diamonds in the warm light of the kitchen. In another world, in the right world, they were. But Jimmy lived in the wrong world, where he held an empty shell masquerading as the man he loved. Thomas was gone beyond all knowing. There was only this used-up vessel, ready to rot in the ground. And yet, he couldn’t let go, couldn’t stop obsessively stroking back unruly hair as minutes ticked by and the shadows lengthened across the floor. “Anything,” he choked in the stillness.</p>
<p>“Do you mean it?”</p>
<p>Jimmy whipped his head around. That woman was back, standing at the foot of the bed. There was something off about her. One second he would have confidently declared her to be an upright young woman, dark-haired and striking if not beautiful. The next he could have sworn her face was lined and she was downright matronly. The tears in his eyes and the gap in his soul were conspiring to play tricks on him, he knew it, but it made his skin prickle just the same.</p>
<p>“What do you want?” he ground out.</p>
<p>“I want to know if when you say ‘anything’ you mean <em>anything.</em> Because you haven’t done, well, much of anything at all, have you? Going from gracing a man with your presence to ‘I would do anything’ is a bit of a tall order.” Her voice was quiet, deep for a woman and utterly unaffected.</p>
<p>Jimmy blanched. “What do you know about it, then?” He wished he could keep the tremble out of his voice. He wanted to be left alone to press Thomas to his chest and mourn in his own way. In private. The bloody undertaker or whatever she was wouldn’t be pushing people out and <em>insinuating</em> things, never mind that she was right on all points, if it were one of them upstairs. None of this would have happened if it had been one of them upstairs. Jimmy felt an itching headache behind his eyes that told him he was running out of tears. “Go away,” he whispered into Thomas’ hair.</p>
<p>“I know a lot of things, Jimmy Kent. Like how <em>she</em> took your virginity or that you never buy your own cigarettes.” She flicked a lighter, Thomas’ lighter, for emphasis. “Mostly, I know you have a song that doesn’t belong to you. And I won’t go away, not until you answer me.”</p>
<p>A shiver ran through him, bone deep. Something in him, something primal and repressed, told him to get on his knees before her, to press his forehead to her sensible black shoes in supplication. “I would,” he said, his voice raw. “Do anything, I mean. Not that I suppose it matters.”</p>
<p>“And if it did matter?”</p>
<p>“Listen, I don’t know who you are or what you’re playin’ at, but just leave me alone, alright? Please. Whatever this is, I just want to be left alone.”</p>
<p>“Come here.”</p>
<p>“Why?”</p>
<p>“Indulge me. He’ll keep for a moment, and don’t you want the lighter?”</p>
<p>Yes. Yes, he did want the lighter. Or at least he didn’t want anyone else to have it. He rose reluctantly on unsteady legs and was yanked in front of the basin for his trouble. Christ alive, she was strong. He looked in the mirror and saw only one person reflected back. He was terribly familiar. His hair was white instead of blonde, thin and receding from his sun-spotted forehead, but the blue eyes sunken behind translucent skin and crow’s feet were unchanged. The Jimmy in the mirror was humming to himself and rummaging about some unseen surface. Probably the sink in the sunny, blue-tiled bathroom reflected behind him.</p>
<p>“Thomas?”</p>
<p>“What?” came that oh-so-familiar voice from another room.</p>
<p>Jimmy’s heart was beating out of his chest. He was going mad, or dreaming, or witnessing some sort of impossible magic trick.</p>
<p>“Have you seen that cologne Hettie got me? The one wi’ that…green thingummy on it.”</p>
<p>“S’in the bathroom.”</p>
<p>“It en’t.”</p>
<p>Thomas shuffled in from the left. Also white-haired and careworn, his autumn-mist eyes behind a pair of wire-frame spectacles. He was perfect. Jimmy longed to touch him, to feel his warm cheek beneath his fingers. Thomas reached up on top of the mirror and took down a small bottle, giving the other Jimmy, his Jimmy, an amused frown and a kiss on the nose.</p>
<p>“Well it’s not <em>my</em> fault you went and hid it up in tall-people-land, is it?” Mirror-Jimmy objected.</p>
<p>Thomas rolled his eyes. “I didn’t hide it anywhere, you numpty. Now hurry up, we’re gonna be late.”</p>
<p>“What would you give for him?” the strange woman asked, making him jump out of his skin. When he looked back in the mirror, his present self stared at him with red-rimmed eyes. Her face loomed beside him, still shifting almost imperceptibly. It made him nauseous.</p>
<p>“How did you do that?” he croaked.</p>
<p>“Fate’s a funny thing. Manifold, you might say. Some things are fixed, others not so much. If his thread hadn’t been cut by now, as well it might have been, he was always doomed to hack away at it himself. As for whether or not it snapped today…well, life is always a game of minutes, isn’t it? That in there is what might have been, if someone bought him a few minutes. So, Mr. Kent, what would you pay?”</p>
<p>“Anything,” he whispered, a broken record. He rubbed his eyes. A few minutes. Thomas was dead because someone was just a moment too late. He had no trouble believing that. Bound wrists were evidence enough that someone thought there was a chance. </p>
<p>“You don’t believe minutes are for sale.” She smiled at him like he was some affable stray cat she was petting.</p>
<p>“How could they be?”</p>
<p>“Someone’s tried it before, you know. Another golden boy with a special song. You thought he was a proper idiot, isn’t that what you said? The Fates might loathe a cheat, but they love a precedent. I’d call that a draw in your favour.”</p>
<p>Jimmy remembered saying that. He remembered a big red book from his lordship’s library. Greek mythology, in Jimmy’s world, came wrapped in a soft Mancunian accent, peppered with smirks and knowing looks. Thomas always kept the really bawdy ones (and the queer ones that kept Jimmy up at night, he would never look at hyacinths the same way again) for quiet evenings when it was just the two of them. He had gamely read Orpheus and Eurydice in the servants’ hall.</p>
<p>“That’s just rubbish,” Jimmy had declared. “He’s such a brilliant musician he gets his wife out the Underworld, all he’s got to do is <em>not bloody turn around</em>, he gets all the way to the finish line, and decides to look back? He deserved to lose her forever.”</p>
<p>“I think he’s proper tragic,” said Daisy softly.</p>
<p>“He’s a proper idiot, s’what he is,” Jimmy grumbled.</p>
<p>Jimmy closed his eyes. He wondered where that book was now, what shelf it lived on, gathering dust in Grantham’s library. It was mad, the whole thing was mad. He was a mad man standing in front of a mad mirror with a mad almost-certainly-not-woman in a mad world. And he was desperate enough to accept a mad premise.</p>
<p>“How much do a few minutes cost?”</p>
<p>“Oh sweetie, time is cheap. You can buy some for a song,” she giggled. “Turn around.”</p>
<p>There was a hole in the floor. A man-sized round hole in the floor that hadn’t been there a moment ago. It sliced through the boards, the beams, the plaster of the lower ceiling. But where there should have been a room beneath there was a black void, stretching endlessly out and down. Cold seeped up from it like sewer gas, spreading through the room and grabbing at his ankles. The body lying abed on the other side of it looked small and far away, less like his Thomas and more like the corpse it was. He could see rigor mortis settling in the bizarre angle of its shoulders. He shuddered. The real Thomas was down <em>there</em>, he told himself<em>.</em> Somewhere. <em>Good God, I’m really buying this rubbish but there’s a bleeding hole in the floor and how can that be—</em></p>
<p>“You’ll have to give the Ferryman his due,” she carried on, as if they were talking about the weather. “He’s got little use for music. Prefers cash, that one. This should cover a return trip.” She produced a silver coin bearing the phases of the moon, holding it and the lighter in her open palm. “So,” she grinned at him like a Cheshire Cat, “will you try to succeed where a greater man failed?”</p>
<p>Jimmy stared down into the pit. It was madness. He wasn’t a hero. He was a hypocrite, a coward, a liar. He was a weak-willed, jumped-up, stupid little shite at the end of the day. There were other men, better men, more deserving of second chances. Yet he was the one being handed a way to fix what was broken. Why? Where was the catch? It was unfair if there wasn’t one, grotesquely so. But it was also for Thomas. Thomas, who, were the shoe on the other foot, wouldn’t hesitate for an instant. Thomas wouldn’t worry about what was fair, wouldn’t be about to piss himself from fear at the yawning emptiness before him, or from fear for his sanity either. He would already have taken what was offered and jumped without a second thought. Jimmy wasn’t a hero. That was always Thomas’ job when it came to them. But Thomas was gone, and Jimmy had a choice.</p>
<p>He picked up the coin and the lighter.</p>
<p>
  <em>Here’s to you and here’s to me.</em>
</p>
<p>He took one last look at the bed.</p>
<p>
  <em>And here’s to growing old together.</em>
</p>
<p>Jimmy stepped off into the abyss.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Styx</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>TW for panic attacks and implied PTSD.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“You wouldn’t be silly and look back, would you Jimmy?” Ivy made moon eyes at him. “I bet you’d be better than that.”</p><p>“Aye, I would.” He put on his best charming grin and watched Alfred squirm out the corner of his eye.</p><p>“And what if you’d been tricked?” Thomas asked quietly. “What if you made it all the way out and she wasn’t there?”</p><p>“Well, I’d just have to go back in and have it out with Hades, wouldn’t I, Mr. Barrow? He’s the one who let down the bargain, so he can answer for it. I bet he swore on the river, too.”</p><p>“If you say so,” Thomas murmured. He was wearing his sad little smile, the one that meant <em>oh, you silly boy. It’s never as simple as that.</em></p><p>Falling was simple enough. Jimmy fell for what felt like hours, through the endless dark. There was no sound, no rushing in his ears despite his clothes flapping around him. Falling was the simplest thing a body could do. What the hell he was going to do when he landed was another matter entirely. He had been trying not to think about it as he tumbled through nothingness, convincing himself that he would cross that bridge when he came to it. Although, if this deafened falling wasn’t going to end any time soon, perhaps a plan was—</p><p>His back hit sand with a decisive thud, like a single heartbeat. It was a soft landing, as if he had only dropped from a few feet instead of the entire distance between the stratosphere and the centre of the Earth, possibly several times over. He still screamed at the shock of feeling something solid and the sudden brightness overhead. He squeezed his eyes shut and breathed through the dizziness, digging his fingers into the ground until everything stopped spinning. There was sound, now, too. Far away, there were windchimes. Beneath their soft tinkling, the almost imperceptible roar of flowing water. He pushed himself up on his knees and looked around. The grey-brown sand stretched to the too-close horizon, its untouched ripples only marred by the evidence of Jimmy’s undignified entrance. He was relieved, in a distant sort of way, that no one had been around to witness him squealing like a girl. Above him was a bright, watered-ink sky with neither discernable cloud nor sun, like he was part of an illustration on an otherwise blank page. His stomach turned over. He knew with unshakeable certainty that this place did not exist on Earth.</p><p>Jimmy set off towards the windchimes on stiff legs. The breeze was gentle, but it seemed to tug at him with a nagging force, as if it had tiny hooks. It caught in his hair and clothes, whispering to him. He almost fancied he heard it say <em>turn back</em>. He shivered and kept walking, shaking his head like a wet dog until the chimes hidden in the looming mist drowned it out. A strange calm settled over him. Either he was dreaming, in which case none of this mattered, or he was truly running into the Underworld to get Thomas back. He had a task now, a purpose for his being. Even if the task was mad and impossible, he would find a way. He had to.</p><p>The reeds resolved before him out of nothing, the river flowing dark beyond them. Within their stalks were hung untold numbers of valuables: coins, chains, bells, earrings, beads, watches—even a little pewter spoon, the kind a child might use. They knocked together and rang amidst the whispering of the reeds, their shining reflections mimicking them in the black water. It was beautiful and unnerving in equal measure.</p><p>“Well that’s not something one sees every day,” a scratchy voice remarked from his left. The voice belonged to a tall, thin man, cloaked in grey. He stood on a pier, his gloved hands on the mooring line of a small barge that bobbed in the shallows. “Usually, one only meets mortals of the dead variety.”  </p><p>Jimmy swallowed and stepped onto the planks. There was nothing but shadow beneath the Ferryman’s hood, yet he had the distinct impression he was being looked over with a quizzically raised eyebrow. “I’d like to go across, please,” he managed at length, in his best upstairs voice. He sounded like a child.</p><p>“Why would you want to do that?”</p><p>“I’ve got to bring someone back.”</p><p>“How irregular.” The Ferryman frowned. Or perhaps he didn’t, and Jimmy merely <em>thought</em> he did. “The planets have turned and come back again many times up above since such a thing has been tried. One remembers it well, notwithstanding.”</p><p>“I have money. The—<em>she</em> said it was good for a return trip.” Jimmy held up the silver coin, noticing that the other side depicted a wheel and a flaming torch. The Ferryman leaned in for closer examination but made no move to take it.</p><p>“Ah. Hecate jests. One offers passage the other way for free; this she knows. It seems only fair, as it happens so seldom. But one accepts your strange request, strange living-man. On you get.”</p><p>Jimmy boarded the barge before he could think too much about his situation. He went to hand the coin to the Ferryman, but the eerie bastard was already tucking it up his loose sleeve. He chuckled at Jimmy’s gaping mouth as he took up the pole and pushed off. </p><p>The other bank was invisible in the mist, however Jimmy could tell the river was wider than any he had ever seen. It must be shallow for the barge pole to be any use, but given that the current didn’t seem to affect the craft in the slightest, perhaps such considerations didn’t apply in Hell.</p><p>“Do you just string ’em all up in the reeds for decoration, then?” Jimmy asked to fill the silence.</p><p>“One’s mistress looks so pretty in them.”</p><p>“Your what now?”</p><p>“Lady Styx is so beautiful, she ought to always be shining too.” He leaned over the water as he spoke, his empty hood angling down into its depths.</p><p>Jimmy looked too. Beneath the eddies of the river’s inky surface lay a woman, her hair fanning about her like the fronds of water weeds. Gold and silver piled over her otherwise naked body, hanging in strings about her breasts and waist, trailing off into the silt. Looking her in the face was like staring into the sun, yet he couldn’t look away until he felt himself falling and jerked back into the boat.</p><p>“Christ,” he muttered.</p><p>“One told you she was beautiful. She also demands all oaths upon her be fulfilled. One swore to bedeck her in all one’s riches. So it was spoken. So it must be.”</p><p>Jimmy shuddered.</p><p>“Oh, don’t look so frightened. She doesn’t bite. Her touch makes a man invulnerable if the stars are in the right place. Have a dip.”</p><p>“Nah, mate. S’ hubris, that is.”</p><p>The Ferryman roared with laughter. “You come to steal from Death and force the Fates to rework their tapestry, yet you are concerned with hubris? You’re hilarious, living-man.” </p><p>“Well it wouldn’t do to add to the list of me transgressions, would it?” Jimmy muttered irritably, hugging his knees.</p><p>The spectre kept laughing, even as he steered them to the opposite bank. The mist was thicker here, the reeds drained of colour and unadorned. As soon as Jimmy set foot on the sand something shifted in the air, like ripples from a skipped stone. He tensed.</p><p>“You’ve certainly made an impression. One must warn you, the Underworld cares not for trespassers. It’s unnatural, what you want to do.”</p><p>“Don’t tell me you’re gonna try and talk me out of it now.”</p><p>“One is not here to talk anyone out of anything. One merely suggests that you might find Thomas Barrow in the arms of the River Lethe. It is not an easy embrace to leave behind. Be careful what you wish for, living-man. There are gods around to listen.”</p><p>“I <em>will</em> find him.” If he said it enough, he would surely believe it.</p><p>“Of course you will. One awaits your return.” Had anyone else said it, Jimmy would have thought it was sarcasm. He wasn’t entirely sure the Ferryman knew what sarcasm was.</p><p>Jimmy nodded stiffly. <em>At least someone has some faith.</em> He turned and walked into the mist, his head held high. He had heard somewhere once that if you smiled it made you feel happier, and if you held yourself with confidence it made you feel braver. It had seemed plausible at the time, and even though years of personal experience taught him otherwise, he still found himself doing it. The sand soon gave way to mud that sucked at his dress shoes, and the mist only thickened. It occurred to him that he had no bloody idea where he was going. The Ferryman had said the Lethe, but where was that? He had been so taken aback at the sound of Thomas’ name on those non-lips that he hadn’t bothered to ask. <em>Stupid, stupid, stupid</em>. Thomas would be so much better at this. The thought came unbidden and he shoved it forcefully back down. He walked with one hand out in front, staring in vain through the curtain of vapour. Staring so hard that he tripped and fell into the muck, which had become considerably deeper.</p><p>“Bloody, buggering…” he looked back to see what unfortunate object had had the audacity to catch his foot at a time like this. There, half-submerged, was a tin hat. That was when he first heard the distant thudding, the kind he had hoped to go his entire life never hearing again. He swiveled his head, trying to figure out where it was coming from, but it was suddenly everywhere and getting closer.</p><p>He scrambled to his feet and peered around, trying to find something, anything to orient himself by. The shell screamed through the air and flashed for an instant, throwing up football-sized clods of earth and God-knew-what-else in time with its delayed thunderclap. Jimmy ran. It was stupid and wrong and certainly not what he had been trained to do, but, in his defense, he had never made a logical contingency plan for ‘suddenly surrounded by shelling in Hell with zero visibility.’ It was like trying to run through custard. He slipped and slid with every panicked step, terrified thoughts of barbed wire and broken bodies knocking about his skull. The outline of the landscape was illuminated by explosions, torn and barren. It was France all over again, dirt and ruin and the wet copper smell so deep in his nostrils he thought he would never get it out.</p><p>The trench was a blessing. He sprinted towards it and jumped, tumbling arse-over-teakettle down a pile of sandbags. He lay in the dirt, breathing hard through the nose and trying to slow his thundering pulse. Artillery continued to rain overhead. It was debatable whether being in a trench was really any safer for him, but Jimmy felt like he could be small here, tucked into the ground with his eyes squeezed shut. His fingers found purchase in the dead plant roots reaching out from the wall, as if by gripping them he might be sucked into the womb of the earth and find sanctuary there. He didn’t know how long he stayed like that, slowly coming to terms with the fact that none of this was about to stop. Time meant nothing, here in the dark of his own eyelids. He had to remember that this wasn’t the war, not really. It wasn’t <em>real</em> the way that had been, surely. Could he die in this place? Certainly no one else could, at least. He just had to stop being a coward and get up. Get up, get walking, find the Lethe, find Thomas, and get out. He just had to get up. Get up. <em>Get up, you useless bastard.</em></p><p>He opened his eyes, which was a start, at least. He could do this. He could take stock of the situation. Yes. He was in a trench. Good. The mist wasn’t so thick here. He could see about twenty feet in either direction. Also good. Excellent, in fact. A vast improvement. <em>So if you could stop shaking and get the fuck up that would be brilliant.</em> He forced himself to his hands and knees, fighting the urge to retch. Halfway there, practically. Lieutenant Hyles rose up in his mind, shouting at him to do his duty, mocking the tears on his cheeks. He stumbled to his feet, gulping air and leaning against the wall. <em>It’s not real. It’s all a very vivid dream. A very, very loud dream. You’re fine. You’ve got a job to do.</em></p><p>To his right was the pile of sandbags that had broken his fall. Further on in that direction there seemed to be an abnormal amount of <em>stuff</em><em>;</em> supply crates, guns, stretchers, barrels, all strewn about haphazardly and glowing periodically in the light of artillery fire. It looked fundamentally odd, all drained of colour and wrong somehow, as if all the labels and fittings had been placed slightly off-centre. To his left was nothing. Just the bare walls and floor of the trench, stretching as far as he could see, limited though that was. This felt like something. Some sort of choice or test that would mean something to him if only he were cleverer. Thomas would—<em>absolutely not. Stop it.</em> Right. Okay. So. Everything or nothing? Obstruction or a clear path? Wrong or simply not there? Presence or absence—that was a good one, poetic really. Poetic and about as helpful as the hammering of the goddamn sodding guns. Maybe he was going about this the wrong way. He had walked through a whole lot of nothing to get here. It wasn’t pleasant, but one hell of a lot better than this. One point to the left. Walking about in nothing had been unhelpful, though, and had ultimately led to being here. Point right. Okay. Which would Thomas choose? Jimmy tried to picture him standing beside him, calm and collected, frowning like it was all some sort of big puzzle game. It made his eyes sting.</p><p>“Well there’s nothing you can do with nothing, is there? And if you’re wrong you might be up a tree with nothing to orient yourself,” the Thomas in his head pointed out. Fair enough.</p><p>Jimmy clambered over the sandbags and set off, keeping his back stooped in the way that had become second nature. He had to weave his way through all the trappings of war, doing his best to make a note of anything <em>particularly</em> unusual, like the neat pile of uniform buttons or the artillery gun with a stuffed rabbit sitting on it. Everything looked drained, desaturated like the colour and vibrance had been sucked down into the mud.</p><p>He thought the first man was a sandbag until he moved. It took Jimmy everything he had not to scream. The man seemed too old to be in the trenches, with his grey mustache and bushy eyebrows. He didn’t even look at Jimmy, his eyes fixed on some point in the middle distance.</p><p>“Hello?” Jimmy ventured, his voice cracking as if from long disuse.</p><p>No response.</p><p>“Right then.”</p><p>There were more of them, every so often. Some were in groups of two or three, but most were alone, curled in on themselves in the darkest corners they could find. Every age, every type of uniform was represented, even Germans. Most didn’t acknowledge him at all, and those that did looked him over like he was some kind of strange insect but said nothing. Their silence became oppressive to him, like he was being swathed in layer upon layer of cotton. Silence. The guns had stopped. His hands hadn’t stopped shaking.  </p><p>“Kent?”</p><p>Jimmy turned to the pile of rags that had spoken. His stomach dropped when he recognized the sad brown eyes and freckles. The last time he had seen those eyes they were glassy and vacant, two marbles in an empty mask.</p><p>“Briggs?” he managed at length.</p><p>“Been wonderin’ when I’d see you here. But you’re all…” Briggs gestured vaguely. “Funny ’round the edges.”</p><p>“You’ve been here all this time?” Jimmy’s ever-so-slightly-calmed pulse picked up again. The others he had passed had been unreal to him, just more scenery in this awful dreamscape he had to traverse. But Briggs was real to him. This man had lived and laughed and played cards with him, had gasped out his last trying in vain to hold in the guts that spilled from his abdomen.</p><p>“Has it been an awful long time?” Briggs asked.</p><p>Jimmy nodded.</p><p>“Well…we’re here because we’re here because we’re here, innit?”  </p><p>“The war’s over, mate. Y’know…y’know where you are, right?” Jimmy couldn’t bring himself to say ‘you know you’re dead, don’t you?’</p><p>“Aye, I know. S’ never over down here. This place gives you what you deserve. Can’t you feel it?”</p><p>He shuddered. “You don’t deserve this. Nobody deserves it.”</p><p>Briggs only chuckled humourlessly. Jimmy wanted to be sick. He thought of all the people he had walked by, all those wasted souls. It was bad enough that they had to die like they did. It wasn’t right.</p><p>“It’s not fair,” he insisted.</p><p>“Isn’t it? I let them die.” Briggs’ voice rose. “I let them all die. That’s what weren’t fair. You did it too, Kent. You let better men take your goddamn bullets for ya.”</p><p>Jimmy flinched. “Shut up.”</p><p>“You think you can escape your punishment?” His eyes were bugged out of his skull and he kept licking his lips with an unnaturally colourless tongue.</p><p>“Too right I do.” Jimmy angled his chin up, though his voice shaking rather killed the effect. He had a job to do. “I need to find the Lethe.”</p><p>“Coward,” Briggs spat. “Nobody gets out. Nobody goes home. You think you could forget? Nobody can forget, nobody!”</p><p>Jimmy backed away, opening his mouth and shutting it like a fish.</p><p>“Nobody!” he shouted.</p><p>There were murmurs up and down the line now; some dormant thing was waking up. Jimmy could have sworn the trench used to be wider and shallower. He turned his face away from his one-time comrade. “You don’t deserve this, Briggs,” he whispered as he walked briskly away on unsteady legs.</p><p>“You’re damned just the same as I am, Kent! We swore!” Briggs shrieked after him.</p><p>He broke into a run, feverishly scrambling over debris to put distance between himself and Briggs. The murmuring continued, getting louder and more acute, like the buzzing of angry wasps. The men stared at him now with night-creature eyes, stirring in their places. He had to get out, had to get anywhere. Suddenly the once-safe trench seemed like the most dangerous place he could be. He climbed the first ladder he came across up into no man’s land and staggered across the muddy expanse. His breath rattled wetly in and out of his lungs, adding minutely to the mist.</p><p>He cried when he saw the reeds, heard the gentle flow of the Styx. He was right back where he started. He fell to his knees on the bank, staring into the black depths. The immensity of what he was trying to do hit him as he sat there, the tears running down his face already cold. Jimmy didn’t know what he had imagined would be waiting for him here, or if he had had time to imagine anything at all. Whatever it was, it wasn’t this. Not this emptiness, this echo of the worst of the world that threatened to drown him. None of it was fair. He half thought of trying to retrace his steps and go the other way, but knew that he couldn’t face it. There was a sick certainty in the pit of his stomach that he wouldn’t be any better off if he had chosen differently. He was in Hell, and all the answers were wrong ones.</p><p>Thomas was out there somewhere, deep in the mist, going through God-knew-what. And Jimmy couldn’t save him. As usual, he had taken on something too big and too much and gotten in too deep before he realized what a fool he was being. Just like the war, like the drinking, the gambling, like O’Brien and Alfred and Ivy and bloody Anstruther. And this time there was no one to look out for him, to do anything and everything to catch him before he fell. He kept trying to look to Thomas for guidance, but Thomas wasn’t there. The one in his head was a poor imitation, a shadow of the real thing cast by Jimmy’s limited imagination. He conjured him anyway, sitting in the rocking chair, <em>his </em>rocking chair with a big red book, blowing out a cloud of smoke. It was irreconcilable with the broken body he had come back to, over which he had promised to do anything.</p><p>He trailed his fingers in the cold, inky water. He couldn’t leave, not without Thomas. Maybe he would die trying, but a promise made was a promise kept. He had already broken far too many vows in his life. “I will find you,” he said aloud to the silence. The reeds shivered. “I promise. Whatever it takes, I’ll find you.”</p><p>The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. He wiped his hand dry on his jacket and looked around. Something nagged at his mind like an itch. He rose to his feet and peered into the mist for whatever fresh horror this place had decided to throw at him. There was nothing. Just slightly more visible mud. And yet, there was…something. Like a shadow seen out of the corner of his eye, or a name on the tip of his tongue. Something over there was calling to him. He looked back at the river and swallowed. It was more than he’d had to go on a moment before.</p><p>Jimmy set off walking away from the River Styx a second time, with tear tracks on his cheeks and mud on his clothes. He would do it as many times as he needed to. He had promised, and he wasn’t going to let Thomas down again. The reeds swayed in the wind behind his retreating figure. <em>So it is spoken,</em> they whispered. <em>So it must be.</em></p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Behold my headcanon for what Charon does with all his shiny coins. I mean, what could the eternal bargeman possibly be buying with that?</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Elysium's Ghost</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Jimmy walked. His whole body ached, as if he had been going for days. Perhaps he had. No sun rose or set here, and when he checked he found his watch had stopped. There was nothing all around him, just mist and empty ground occasionally marked by some abandoned object, evidence of an unknown life. There was a can of bully beef, which made bile rise in his throat and his heart pound against his ribs. There was also a child’s shoe, a lilac handkerchief, and a large ring of keys, like Mrs. Hughes had. In one skin-prickling instance, there were two footprints. Just two. Left, right. Nothing coming or going, despite the ground being equally soft all around. He was so tired. It was tempting to lie down, just for a little while, but the idea of achieving anything approaching rest in the middle of this nothingness was laughable. Besides, the itch in him had grown and sharpened, like a fishhook in his belly that drew him inexorably onwards. <em>Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy</em>, it tugged. <em>You promised.</em></p>
<p>It had to be Thomas. Thomas had heard him, sensed him somehow. And now he was calling out across the vast expanse. He wanted to shout back but didn’t know how. The last time he had drawn attention to himself hadn’t exactly gone well. Walking across an invisible landscape shouting Thomas’ name seemed like a recipe for disaster. He would be a wasp buzzing and bouncing off the glass, screaming ‘look at me,’ oblivious to the descending tea towel until it snapped and he fell, lifeless, to the windowsill.</p>
<p>Sometimes he thought he heard things out in the mist. It was strange how hard it was to trust his ears when there was no corroboration from his other senses. Was there really a horse whinnying when no horse could be seen, no hoofbeats following the sound? Or was he going mad? Was there really a busy street just a breath away to his right, when there was no evidence before him? No cobbles beneath his feet, no people, no smell of smoke or whatever was sizzling? Chips, he reckoned. There was a chip stand. God, what he wouldn’t do for fish and chips. He hadn’t eaten since…since the club. A lifetime ago, before the world tipped on its axis and spilled all over the carpet.</p>
<p>He was so shocked when he saw grass, dead and mangled though it was, that he stopped in his tracks. Those brown blades were so lovely, so something-y that he reached down and brushed them with his fingers. There was a path now, a beaten-out, narrow track through the grass, and the string attached to his insides pulled him onto it. <em>This way, this way, this way.</em></p>
<p>He couldn’t pinpoint exactly when the path started to descend, but the ground was undeniably sloped now. The something-ness proliferated. There were other plants, weeds along the dirt track and vague shadows in the distance that might be trees. He climbed over a broken gate, stuck in a tumbled-down stone wall. He heard voices now, too. They echoed in the distance, mostly unintelligible in tone or substance. Once, though, he was sure there were children laughing.</p>
<p>He saw her at the same time she saw him. The girl’s eyes widened. Her hair flowed about her like she was underwater, as did her little grey skirt. “Maman!” she called, her blue lips moving out-of-time with the sound. “’Y a un fantôme sur le ch’min!” *</p>
<p>A woman’s voice answered from the obscured distance, and the little girl ran off towards it, her clothes floating a bit out behind her. Jimmy stood frozen for a long time after, trying to get his breathing under control. They were all real, then. So very real. And no one was coming for them. But he could get Thomas. <em>You have a job to do.</em> He could put one foot in front of the other and follow the pull, drowned children or not.</p>
<p>So he did. One step at a time, not thinking about what it would mean if this turned out to be a dead end. One step at a time, each one closer than the one before. He kept his eyes forward, trying not to look at the structures that loomed in his peripheral vision. There were houses, just out there, their shadows modest and hunched. They had sounds, too. A cat meowing, a closing door, the squeak-purr, squeak-purr of someone rolling out the washing line. He wondered if these people would scream at him about his cowardice. He shivered. There was humming, too. Vague and a bit tuneless, slowly resolving into something definite, then into a woman’s quiet singing behind a familiar garden wall:</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“In Scarlet town where I was born,</p>
<p>There was a fair maid dwellin’</p>
<p>Made ev’ry youth cry well-a-way,</p>
<p>Her name was Barbara Allen…”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“Mum,” Jimmy croaked, unable to stop himself. Her voice carried him to a simpler time, a better time. A time when he was small enough to sit on her lap at the piano while she arranged his hands on the heavy keys. His talents at the instrument eclipsed her own when he was still a boy, so she scraped together enough money for him to have proper lessons with Mr. Davis. But he had never had a voice half so beautiful.</p>
<p>She stopped. “Jimmy?” she called. Her footsteps fell on the bricks at the edge of the yard. The bricks he used to draw on with chalk when he was a child.</p>
<p>He ran and looped around, crouching behind the white rosebush he knew would be there. He couldn’t face her. Not now. Jimmy could barely reckon with the man he had become within the confines of his own head. He couldn’t bear to shatter her image of her son, of that little rascal who had grown up to be so handsome and get a job as a hall boy in a fine house. There was no telling her that the core was rotten. There had been no telling her when he set pen to paper all those years ago, after she told him how proud she was that he was keeping his chin up, what with his father going off to fight. How could he tell her about her ladyship guiding his hand up her skirt, and how it made him feel so dirty? There was certainly no telling her now about what and who he was here for. She just wouldn’t understand. And Jimmy would not be the one to break her heart. Not this time.     </p>
<p>“Jimmy?” She jogged out onto the path, blonde curls falling out of their pins to rest against her neck. She had her sleeves rolled up and flour on her apron. He wanted to run and bury his face in her skirts, like he had when he was very small. He imagined she would hold him in her arms and kiss his nose, that she could tend his hurts as easily as she had the cuts and bruises inflicted by the boys at school. The pain in him ran too deep for a bandage and some toffee to reach, now.</p>
<p>“He’s not there, Abigail. With any luck he won’t be for a good long time. Come back inside.”</p>
<p>Jimmy clamped a hand over his own mouth. At least Dad wasn’t in that God-awful trench. That was something he could be thankful for. That whatever else, they seemed to be alright.</p>
<p>“I could ’ave sworn…” she muttered. She stared down the path for a long moment before retreating with a sigh. He watched her disappear into the mist. She didn’t resume her singing.</p>
<p>He let out a shuddering breath through his fingers. Everything in his heart screamed to go after her, to tell her he was sorry. Sorry that he wasn’t beside her when she died. Sorry that he was all too willing to go off to war, and couldn’t tell her why. Sorry for the kind of man he was. She had raised better. She deserved better. Perhaps, one day, if he could do the impossible and reach the other side of Thomas’ mirror, he would find himself back here. Then, perhaps, he could tell her of a life well-lived, of a man who became worthy of her. As things stood, it was best to let her have her little golden boy. Everyone deserved at least one illusion, and he had always been hers.</p>
<p>It would be a blessing for the mist to swallow him whole. He half-wanted to be one with it, to be erased and become nothing. He sat back and hugged his knees, straining his ears for some other sound from his family. Anything that came would only twist the knife, but he craved it, even so. Any piece of them he could take with him would be worth it. But there was nothing. There were no such sharp-edged gifts for Jimmy Kent, as the long minutes stretched in the shelter of the rosebush. The moment comes, after the mourners have all gone and the grave digger is eyeing you, when it’s time to go. And it was time to go, or he would give up and rot in that little back garden.</p>
<p>He stood and turned his steps back to the path, back to following that tug beneath his skin. With each step from his childhood home a little piece of him got left behind. He was flaking off, like a papier-mâché doll left in the rain. It was nothing new. He had felt it when he left the first time, in his father’s altered clothes, play-acting at being grown up. He had felt it when he left for the last time, money from the sale of almost everything his family owned, minus the debts, weighing down his pockets. It wasn't much, but it was still alarming how quickly he managed to blow it. The last time he’d felt it was on a cart, refusing to look back at that too-big house, or the man standing in the yard. How many pieces could a person lose, before there was nothing at all? Or did they grow new ones in between, like a tree growing new leaves that it would only lose again come autumn? He hoped that was true. He needed that to be true.</p>
<p>The sounds in the mist faded away behind him. He was grateful for the silence, the solitude. He didn’t want anyone to see him. It was easier like this; just empty ground and opaque air and the tearing pain that said <em>walk this way, or I’ll rip you open</em>. It calmed him to be distilled into a single thought, a single purpose. He had a job to do. There would be time later to curl up and cry until he made himself sick. For now, there was only time to walk. So walk he did. Down, down, and further down.</p>
<p>The track narrowed and curved, hugging the steep hill. There were trees now, looming out of the blank whiteness like water stains. The trunks soon crowded the slopes around him, leaves clapping together softly, breaking up the silence. It could never be mistaken for a normal wood; there were no birds or insects, no small mammals scurrying through leaf litter. Only the tall sentinel poplars drawing in around him. The mud beneath his feet gave way to sand and gravel, the occasional flat stone sitting by the side like a mile mark. Everything was wet. Even the mist had a different quality. Jimmy could see further yet it felt heavier, oppressively humid yet ice-cold. He had felt less alone in the empty mud. He clung to the feeling that pulled him onward, towards Thomas. It had to be Thomas. Jimmy didn’t know what he would do if it wasn’t.</p>
<p>The river surprised him when he came upon it. There was no bone-deep roar of current here, no whispering reeds of the Styx. Just silent, slow-moving water choked with pale silt. <em>Close, close, close,</em> the string tugged. <em>This way, this way, this way. You promised.</em> Jimmy swallowed. Promises made, promises kept. His heart was cracked open and his hands were trembling in his pockets, but he had found the goddamn Lethe.  </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>* Mum! There's a ghost on the path! (vernacular French)</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Lethe</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>TW for description of injuries from suicide. </p>
<p>See endnotes for some chapter-spoiler-y mythology tidbits.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The Lethe moved sluggishly, its whitish flow shifting almost as imperceptibly as a clogged drain. Jimmy picked his way along the stony shore, sometimes slipping on wet slate. The looming trees rose before him and faded away behind like shadows, rattling their shivering, dew-drenched leaves at him. Condensation formed on his body. It collected in his hair and ran in icy tracks down the back of his neck. There was something fleshless about the riverbank, all bent trees and rocky outcrops, the protruding collarbones of the world. He had wished for solitude not long ago. Now, he searched his surroundings for any sign that a single person had passed this way before. The river had a desolation about it, an absence that belied its physical form. It <em>lacked</em>.</p>
<p>Something reached him on the thick air, barely distinguishable from the wet scuttling of poplar leaves. At first it sounded a bit like the scratch of a record. It resolved as he got closer into something more like a man humming, but…inverted. Non-music. Which was daft. The opposite of music was silence, or perhaps dissonant noise. Jimmy wasn’t even sure he was actually <em>hearing </em>whatever this was. He just sensed it, somehow. Like an itch in a phantom limb.</p>
<p>He hadn’t realized how strongly that little fishhook in his gut had been pulling until he was cut loose. “Thomas?” he called, shoving down the panic at losing his only guiding force. The thought that this place was having a laugh, that it had led him here only to abandon him to now was unbearable. The not-music stopped.</p>
<p>Jimmy stepped tentatively down to the water’s edge, scanning the bank. There was a man in the river. He was as still as a stone, his long, colourless hair dragging softly in the current. His equally pale and gossamer shirt floated about him, the loose sleeves held out in front of his body. Jimmy wasn’t sure he could describe him if pressed; it was not so much like looking at a person as looking at an empty suit hanging in the wardrobe. Where Jimmy had felt so strongly about the Ferryman <em>having</em> some sort of face, just not one that could be seen, he felt equally that the face before him was somehow not there.</p>
<p>“Go home, little Orpheus.” Lethe’s words fell from his lips like pebbles into the water. “You don’t belong here.”</p>
<p>“I’m looking for someone,” Jimmy insisted. His voice seemed uncomfortably loud and hoarse.</p>
<p>“And what makes you think someone wants to be found?”</p>
<p>Jimmy swallowed. “He led me here,” he said defiantly. It had to be.</p>
<p>“My sister led you here when she decided to take your oath upon her as true. She must be bored of her toy boat and her trinkets. Try again.” There was no venom or irritation in his words, only a blank statement of fact.</p>
<p>“But…” He had been so sure. Every instinct he possessed had told him that the pull he felt on his soul was Thomas, somewhere, calling his name. The river could be lying, but when he thought back, there it was: his hand in the water, a promise made, a pull at his heart. A feeling of being compelled. He shook his head as if to get rid of water in his ears. “It doesn’t matter.” It did. “He’s here, isn’t he?”</p>
<p>“No one forced your Eurydice to leave you. Who are you to deny what he accepted of his own free will?”</p>
<p>It was a good question. But it was also an answer. Thomas <em>was</em> here, he was close. Jimmy just had to get past this…<em>thing</em>…and he could hold him and tell him all the things he needed to say. He could make him see a life worth living. He could be brave.</p>
<p>“If that’s how it is,” Jimmy’s voice wavered at the possibility that it was. <em>Press on.</em> “Then he can tell me himself. I’m not about to be chased off by you.” He jutted out his chin, in his best ‘I’ll knock you on your arse, try me’ look. He had a feeling the river was not impressed.</p>
<p>“As you wish.” Lethe opened his arms. The head of oil-black hair looked like a void against his pale shirt.</p>
<p>“Thomas!” Jimmy screamed. He had never seen Thomas look so peaceful. There was always something pulling his face, even in sleep. Now there was a window into what he might have looked like in a simpler, more carefree life. The face Jimmy might have woken up to every day, if they lived in a better world.</p>
<p>Thomas’ eyes flickered open to stare blankly into the mist. The soft look on his face was marred by little lines between his brows. He murmured something unintelligible, half-asleep, and reached his hand out from the murky water as if from beneath a blanket.</p>
<p>“Shh, you’re alright. He’s so loud, isn’t he?” Lethe soothed. “I know how you like the quiet.”</p>
<p>Thomas hummed and looked up into that empty face dreamily. Now, that look was more familiar; that look Jimmy almost knew. He knew it from late nights playing cards and stolen smoke breaks, when the mask slipped a little and it hurt to make eye-contact.</p>
<p>“Thomas!” he called again, his heart clawing its way up his throat and threatening to choke him. “Thomas! Can you hear me?”</p>
<p>Thomas’ eyes found him, holding more awareness in them now. He looked Jimmy up and down with something close to that appreciative glance he had bestowed when they first met. Only now his gaze lingered on Jimmy’s muddy clothes and disheveled hair. There was no easy smile, no smirk, no tears or love or heartbreak. He looked, on the whole, like he was faced with a mildly vexing maths problem.</p>
<p>“Thomas,” Jimmy whispered, broken. There was nothing. He had been so spoiled, gotten so used to the affection Thomas carried for him in every line of his face that its absence stole his breath. It was like looking at a stranger wearing Thomas’ skin.</p>
<p>Lethe smiled. “Do you think he’s pretty, my dear? Would you like to go with him?”</p>
<p>“Pretty,” Thomas echoed softly. “I…” He frowned as he trailed off. “I’m dead, aren’t I.”</p>
<p>“Don’t be sad. You’re free. You’re safe. You can rest now, and isn’t that nice?” Lethe drew a colourless poppy from his bosom and brushed the petals against Thomas’ cheek. “Don’t be sad. No one can hurt you here.”</p>
<p>“What’ve you done to him?” Jimmy demanded, finding his voice again at last. The longer he looked at Thomas, the less what he was seeing seemed like peace. It was more an absence of pain than a presence of anything else. He was blank; gone in a way more meaningful than death.</p>
<p>“Me? I am not the disease, little Orpheus, I am the medicine. What have <em>you</em> done to him? What have <em>they</em>?”</p>
<p>Thomas winced and something flowed from from his skull into the water, floating out like the white of a broken egg. Jimmy’s own face was mirrored there. Not as he was now, but a younger, softer version sprawled sleeping on his cot. He felt the press of lips, the hurt, the shame. He saw his own retreating back, speeding away as a fist connected with his jaw, across the yard with Ivy on his arm, along the upstairs hallway and through the bedroom door, on the cart that took him away. <em>I will never see you again</em>. He lay back on the apparatus, wondering if it might kill him. Perhaps that was the cure. Then there was a picture of two men doing something that he hadn’t done in a decade and the doctor lit his body on fire. There was pain and fever and Carson peering at him from under his eyebrows like he was a weevil in Mrs. Patmore’s flour. Always the suspicion. He sat across the desk from his prospective employer. <em>How the fuck can they just tell? Can they smell it on me?</em> Endless suspicion. Earned suspicion. There was a bathtub and a razor. His blood and another’s, so many years ago. He stared at the empty bed. Clarkson’s precious empty bed. There was fear. Fear and a knife’s edge with a thousand-foot drop into madness. Or perhaps the madness was raising a lighter and praying to a God that had allowed such monstrosity in the first place, if He was there at all. His letters burned in the fireplace. Mr. Leigh put a hand on his skinny shoulder. It burned through his shirt. “I don’t wanna play anymore, you freak!” Robby shouted. “You’ll ruin my good name one day, wontcha? Filthy little nancy boy,” Da snarled, spraying whiskey-scented drops of spittle in his face as that giant hand tightened around his throat.  </p>
<p>Jimmy gasped for air before he sank into the murk again. He was freezing and exhausted and unsure of how he came to be in this horrid river, fingers scrabbling at someone’s arm. The someone was a handsome but sickly brunette in an undershirt, who looked just as confused as Jimmy felt.</p>
<p>“You’ve got to relax,” the man told him, gently but firmly. “I’ve got you. Just hold on to me shoulders and stop flailin’ about.”</p>
<p>Jimmy grasped onto him. Something awful must have happened and this man dove in to save him. That seemed like the right order of things. He felt strong legs kick out alongside him, smooth and measured like the ticking of a clock, treading water for both of them. <em>Why are you thinking about clocks?</em></p>
<p>Something was pulling at him, trying to drive their bodies apart and suck him down. Jimmy squeaked, which was undignified, and pressed himself into the broad chest in front of him, which was even less dignified but felt awfully good.</p>
<p>“You’re alright. It’s gonna be fine, just don’t fight the current, yeah?”</p>
<p>They floated for a few seconds like that. The water no longer seemed so cold. It might have almost been peaceful if it weren’t for the alarm bells ringing in the back of Jimmy’s head that screamed at him to get out of the river.</p>
<p>“He wants to take you away.” There was an eerily beautiful man beside them, water clinging to his long, white hair and lashes. He was strange to look at, like an ownerless limb or one of those trick photographs. “Back to all the things that hurt you. He doesn’t understand that you’re tired.” </p>
<p>“We need to go,” Jimmy said flatly. It was imperative that he get out of this river and take Thomas with him. Thomas? When had he acquired a name?</p>
<p>“I think it’s bad out there,” Thomas said tentatively.</p>
<p>“It’s worse in here. <em>He’s</em> worse. We need to go.” Jimmy didn’t know where his certainty was coming from, but there was little else in his mind. He had a job to do. Step one of that job was to get Thomas out of the river. What step two was, he hadn’t the faintest idea.</p>
<p>Thomas looked back and forth between them for a moment before he nodded and struck out for the bank, locking Jimmy across his chest with one arm. Something way down deep in Jimmy crowed triumphantly that Thomas had chosen him so readily.</p>
<p>“You’ll come back,” the pale man called. “You fled to me, and you will again. I have all the time in the universe.”</p>
<p>They scrambled onto the bank together, dripping and shivering. Jimmy thought he must have hit his head. He was sure he had seen the poplar trees before, but he couldn’t place them. It was as if someone had unclasped his brain, dumped everything out on the bed, then thrown it all back in for a quick getaway. It was all there; he was quite sure. The weight was right. If anything, some bits had been added. But it would take him a while to piece together anything comprehensible.</p>
<p>They climbed a way up the slope and sat beneath a tree, leaning their backs against the trunk and panting. Thomas’ fingers clenched and unclenched, dancing across his knees. His left hand was marred by a mass of puckered scar tissue. <em>He wants a cigarette</em> and <em>God, that’s what’s under the glove</em> both floated to the top of Jimmy’s thoughts.</p>
<p>“I’m dead,” Thomas murmured at length. He turned his hands palm-up and examined his wrists. The cuts there sluggishly leaked blood. It made Jimmy want to vomit but didn’t shock him nearly as much as it ought to have done. “Are you dead?”</p>
<p>“No.” He was at least sure of that much.</p>
<p>“Right. That’s…that’s good, I think. You shouldn’t be dead.”</p>
<p>“Thomas?”</p>
<p>“Yeah?”</p>
<p>Jimmy opened his mouth and shut it again. He had a feeling that what he needed to say couldn’t be uttered right now even if he could figure out exactly what it was. It was too big, too heavy. It couldn’t possibly fit through his constricting throat. So instead he threw his arms around Thomas’ neck and held him close, because he needed to feel him there, solid and real but so impossibly cold. Thomas froze for a moment before his tentative arms wrapped around Jimmy, fingers skittering on his back. “It’s alright,” Jimmy whispered, because something told him Thomas needed to know that it was. “I wantcha to hold me.”</p>
<p>“Jimmy,” Thomas bit out, half-strangled and broken. He slid down and tightened his arms so that they lay on the grass, their bodies pressed together. It was good and right but it also hurt. Jimmy pressed his face into Thomas’ chest, his eyes squeezed shut. He remembered a letter and a hole in the floor. He didn’t know how long it took for everything to be shuffled back in order and re-filed under the proper headings, but he could tell whenever something else slotted into place for Thomas from the way he would shy away from their embrace. Jimmy just hugged him harder. He remembered a handshake and a dishonest goodbye. He remembered the blood-curdling image of a man who looked far too much like his son, drunk and murderous. He waded through it towards Thomas, who sobbed in the arms of the Lethe. He couldn’t swim, but he wasn’t thinking about that. He wasn’t thinking about much of anything, he realized quickly. Except Thomas. He needed to get Thomas out of the river. <em>Get Thomas out of the river.</em> “You would have him in pain because you’ve decided you want your plaything back after all,” Lethe accused. “You selfish little boy.”</p>
<p>“Jimmy,” Thomas began at length, voice trembling, “you’re still alive.”</p>
<p>“Yes.” He buried his face further, chasing Thomas’ scent. It had been washed away, he was sure, but he sought it anyway. He needed it like a drug.</p>
<p>“But you’re here.”</p>
<p>“Yes.” He wanted to crawl inside Thomas’ chest. They could never physically be close enough to make up for all the distance he had endured.</p>
<p>“Christ, I…I mean…How? Why?”</p>
<p>“How’s…complicated. I got a lot of help. I don’t know what’s in it for them, but I don’t care. As for why,” Jimmy swallowed. He couldn’t say it. <em>Why can’t you say it?</em> “You know why,” he whispered instead. He told himself that it was good enough. He didn’t believe it for an instant.</p>
<p>Thomas was silent for a long moment. Jimmy looked up with trepidation to find that broken look he had seen only once before. “Don’t say that if you don’t mean it.”</p>
<p>“I do mean it, ’course I mean it.” He cupped Thomas’ icy cheek in his hand. The other man shivered but leaned into it like a cat. “Do you think I decided to just pop ’round Hell to have a laugh?” Jimmy smiled even as tears welled in his eyes.</p>
<p>“God.” Thomas shook his head, at a loss for words. Jimmy traced his lips with his thumb. He had always wanted to do that. In death, those lips were wrong; pale and chapped and too cold. But when Thomas pressed them to his palm like a believer would kiss a relic Jimmy forgot, just for an instant, that anything could possibly be wrong. The blood seeping into his shirt sleeve brought him back to reality.</p>
<p>“I’m sorry, Thomas,” he choked out. “I’m so sorry for everything, I would’ve…I’d do anything—”</p>
<p>Thomas hushed him, running gentle fingers through his hair. “None of this is your fault. I won’t deny it hurt when you left, but this is so, so much bigger than that. I’ve been skatin’ on thin ice for an awful long time, Jimmy, and I’m just—I was just so <em>tired</em>. That house ate me, good and proper. It’s never your fault. You only ever lit up me life, my sweet, silly boy. You’ve nothing to apologize for.”</p>
<p>“I do, though,” Jimmy barreled on. “I weren’t good to you. I’ve not been honest with you, or fair, and I don’t know what I was tryin’ to prove when I sent that valentine an’ all. I wanted to haul you up into the cart and take you with me, you know that? You shouldn’t’ve been alone. I should’ve been there. But I’ll be better, Thomas, I swear—” His throat closed and he balled his fists in Thomas’ undershirt, like he could convince the both of them by shaking it into the other man.</p>
<p>Thomas pulled him to his chest again. “It wasn’t your fault,” he murmured over and over into Jimmy’s hair. He stroked his back in little circles, like he was mapping out all the edges of his body. Jimmy melted into it, and the hole in his chest grew a little bigger, his ribs pried open a little wider in the knowledge that he could have had this. He could have had sweet comfort while they were warm and safe and tucked up in bed, instead of lying here dripping ice-water into the dead grass of the Underworld.</p>
<p>“I’m gonna get you out of here,” Jimmy declared, his voice muffled against the fabric.</p>
<p>Thomas paused. “I don’t think it works like that, Jimmy,” Thomas said softly. He used his gentle voice, the one usually reserved for the children. He drew back, holding Jimmy’s face in both hands. “But I am so, so glad I got to see you again.”</p>
<p>“You don’t understand, Thomas,” he said, brushing back that unruly lock of dark hair. “I’ve been told everything’s got a price. I think I know what they want from me, and I’m more than willing t’ give it.”</p>
<p>Thomas shook his head, worry tugging at his mouth. “Jimmy—”</p>
<p>“I saw us old together.”</p>
<p>Thomas paused. “What d’you mean?”</p>
<p>“There was this woman—Hecate—and she showed me the two of us. We were just…there. We were bickering a bit, if I’m honest. And I were half-bald and you were podgy and wearin’ glasses and I’ve never wanted anything so much in me whole life. And I don’t care what I have to pay, because I—” The words clogged Jimmy’s throat. But he knew that they couldn’t stick there forever. How much of this could have been avoided, if he’d just managed to spit them out in the first place? But he could fix it, he <em>would</em> fix it, because Thomas was worth it. Those old men in the mirror were worth it. And hadn’t he said it already, in all but those exact words? “Because I love you, you horrid, perfect man.” <em>There.</em></p>
<p>Nothing changed. The sky didn’t cave in, nobody spun in their graves, Jimmy was no different and neither was Thomas. He might as well have declared that the sun rose in the East. It always had. Saying it aloud didn’t make it so, nor did it make it any more or less meaningful. It just meant that he wasn’t an absolute blithering idiot who thought it rose anywhere else. He almost laughed.</p>
<p>Thomas blinked heavily, his jaw working around nothing. “I love you too, Jimmy,” he whispered at length. “So much.”</p>
<p>“Do you trust me?”</p>
<p>“Yes.”</p>
<p>“Then will you come with me? If I can find a way for us to be old together, will you give it a chance?”</p>
<p>Thomas closed his eyes and heaved a breath. “Would you want me, Jimmy? Even if I never manage to be quite alright in the head, let alone give you your travel, or your—” he swallowed, “—beautiful women or your champagne?”</p>
<p>“Thomas, look at me.” Jimmy grabbed Thomas’ jaw and held him there until those pale eyes locked with his. “Sod the travel, and the champagne too. I’d say sod the women, but you’d get all jealous on me.” That earned him a startled laugh, punched out in the quiet like a glass breaking. “We find a way out of here, and it’s Thomas and Jimmy contra mundum. Always and no matter what.” His voice broke and became a whisper. “Come with me?”</p>
<p>Thomas nodded, familiar adoration settling into the lines of his face. “Anywhere.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I haven't been putting mythology or symbolic explanation in the notes thus far because I think everything relevant to understanding the plot is in the text. But I thought I would put some here because a) Lethe is a little more obscure and b) I've made some specific decisions about adaptation, so here you go:</p>
<p>The Styx is the river of promises on which the gods make their vows. In Hesiod's Theogony there is a lengthy penance described as the price for breaking such an oath. However, some stories like the myth of Semele imply that being forsworn to the goddess is simply not an option, and that anyone who swears would be compelled in some way to follow through. The author has run with this.</p>
<p>The Lethe is the river of oblivion/forgetfulness, which souls might drink from so that they can forget their past lives and be reborn. The personification is traditionally female, but I made them male-presenting in this for added Gay Tension. Lethe and Styx are also not siblings canonically, Lethe not even being a god so much as a personified concept, but they are both rivers in the Underworld so that was more the referenced kinship there. In Orphism, a mystery religion based on writings attributed to, you guessed it, Orpheus, initiates were taught not to drink from the Lethe when they died. They were told instead to drink from the pool of Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, and achieve omniscience. </p>
<p>And just for fun: a symbol of Hypnos (Sleep) is a poplar branch dripping with the water of the Lethe.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Sacred Chords</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“What’re you up to, then?”</p><p>“Makin’ staff paper.” Jimmy put aside the ruler he had borrowed from Anna.</p><p>“I didn’t know you were a composer.” Mr. Barrow eased himself down into his rocking chair with his book, pain flickering across his face for the briefest instant before being glossed over. He had been back at work for almost two weeks. Jimmy knew his ribs still hurt. “Never heard you working on anything.”</p><p>“Oh, I dabble.” Jimmy pulled up the sheet he had made and began to pen in the clefs and key signatures. It was still strange, this whole being friends business. But it was getting easier. Dare he say nice, even.</p><p>“Was that you bein’ <em>humble</em> just now?”</p><p>“I’m very humble, Mr. Barrow. Also charming, handsome, and clever. Read us something, will ya?” </p><p>Barrow snorted a laugh. “It won’t distract you? It’s that American poetry you had a fit about.”</p><p>“Go on. ’M stuck anyway. I just want to copy out what I did before breakfast all neat-like.”</p><p>Barrow frowned. “Jimmy, do you write without hearing what it sounds like? You know most people, even famous composers, can’t do that, right?”</p><p>Jimmy scratched the back of his neck. He wasn’t entirely comfortable with sharing how this particular piece just came out of him sometimes, like a startled curse or a nosebleed. “Most people can’t lick their elbows either, Mr. Barrow. I can’t say I’ve really thought about it.”</p><p>“They don’t remember Mozart for how he licked his elbow,” said Mr. Barrow. Mercifully, he let it drop, opening his small tome and flicking through a few pages. “This one’s alright, it’s about Lincoln’s death.” He cleared his throat. “‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d; And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night; I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring…’”</p><p>It was somewhat better than alright, despite the dreariness. Though he had a feeling that if someone else read it, it might sound terribly trite. He copied his disjointed day-break scribbles, up to the place where he had lost the thread. Where it should really shift to E minor. Obviously.</p><p>The poplars were slick with rain. It rolled off their leaves and fell in fat drops onto the path. Jimmy’s clothing was plastered to his skin, bunching and sticking uncomfortably. He barely noticed. He was holding Thomas’ <em>hand</em>. His left hand, naked and vulnerable without its glove. Knowing the full extent of the damage that had been hidden made him want to cry, or at least hit something. He would never let go.</p><p>They didn’t speak. Any words between them now would be either too light for the matter at hand or too heavy for the delicate balance of their frayed nerves. They didn’t have to speak, in a way. They had spent so much of their time together talking of nothing, with the momentous lurking just below the surface. Now, the momentous had been spoken, and all else was noise. Jimmy’s whole body tingled. He had a job to do, and he had already done the hard part. He wasn’t alone anymore.</p><p>The trees thinned out up ahead, giving way to empty mist. Jimmy’s stomach turned at the prospect of passing by home again, but he needn’t have worried. The vacant gloom stretched all around them, with nothing but the muddy path sloping up beneath their feet. That silence was back. Their breathing echoed in it, unchallenged.</p><p>“Jimmy,” Thomas whispered, “Is this what it looked like when you came down?”</p><p>“No. You?”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“It’s like a dream, innit? Where rooms are in the wrong place. Explains why I didn’t cross the trench again.”</p><p>“You <em>what</em>?”</p><p>“Please don’t ask,” Jimmy begged. He had kept himself from completely falling apart so far, but he knew that if Thomas went and tugged, everything would crash to the floor. </p><p>Thomas nodded and squeezed his hand. This was what he loved, what he had missed: the way that Thomas simply understood, without prying or judgement. This man had always accepted him absolutely, with no delusions about who or what Jimmy was. What possessed him to do so, Jimmy would never know, but he wouldn’t take it for granted again. He squeezed back, squinting ahead at the shadow that rose before them.</p><p>The shadow resolved itself into a stone wall, towering up into the obscured sky like a reproach. Set into it was a single wrought-iron gate. It reminded Jimmy of the entrance to a fancy park, or perhaps a cemetery. Around it grew a profusion of lilacs. He felt Thomas shiver. None of this was familiar. He looked behind him into the nothingness. There was no going back, only forward. He knew what he needed to do. <em>Nothing for it</em>.</p><p>He pulled Thomas along with a confidence that he did not truly possess. That was another thing that Thomas had taught him: you could be scared and still choose to be brave. A man who never got scared was a moron. A man who did the right thing even when he was scared was a hero. Jimmy Kent could be a hero. It was his turn, after all.</p><p>Jimmy pushed on the gate. The metal was ice-cold, and it gave an awful rusty shriek as it swung open. They both winced. ‘Look at me,’ it screamed. The other side of the wall was opaque. There was nothing visible beyond the few feet around the gate, even the tops of the lilacs disappearing into blankness. The path was gone, too, replaced by untouched grass. Jimmy heard something move on his left. </p><p>A plump, middle-aged man in a shabby brown suit leaned against the wall, petting the mastiff at his side. “Nice day for it, gents,” he greeted cheerfully around an unlit fag, tipping his bowler. His hair was receding and going grey at the temples. If he had shown up at Downton, Jimmy would have barely noticed him, assuming he was a supplier, or perhaps a tenant. Here, his ease of manner was disturbing. “Got a light?”</p><p>Jimmy found himself wordlessly approaching and flicking Thomas’ lighter. The brightness of it made him flinch in its intensity.</p><p>“Ta,” said the man, breathing out a thick, tumbling curtain of mist that crawled along the ground and swallowed Jimmy’s feet. The dog whined at its master, a sound like multiple unoiled hinges vibrating its jowls as it drooled on his shoe. “Oh, stop it. S’not even food,” he chided the beast. Three pink tongues emerged from behind rows of teeth to lick at his hand. “Daft creature. Had him forever, and he still thinks if it’s anywhere near me mouth, he ought to have a piece, no matter what it is. Took him a bleedin’ millennium t’ make an exception for the missus, and sometimes he still goes and forgets it over the summer.” He chuckled.</p><p>Jimmy pulled Thomas closer. He had expected the King of the Underworld to be more impressive. Or at least that he wouldn’t look and sound like some bloke in a Yorkshire pub.</p><p>“Don’t look so disappointed, Mr. Kent,” Hades said, taking another drag. “You know how it is. Your dancin’ shoes might be fun for a while, but after a time it’s the old down-at-heel slippers that become your favourites. Or is it the lack of horns and a pitchfork that’s your trouble?”</p><p>“I’ve got no trouble,” Jimmy managed, swallowing.</p><p>“Sure you do, you’re holdin’ hands with him.”</p><p>Jimmy squared his shoulders. He could do this. He had been expecting this. Well, not <em>this</em>, exactly, not even close. But he hadn’t expected to just waltz out. “You know what I’m here for.”</p><p>Hades held up his hands. “Straight to business, then, I can appreciate that. Aye, I know what you’re here for. And you know that everything has a price.”</p><p>“That’s what Hecate told me.”</p><p>Hades pursed his lips. “Gave you some big speech, did she? She’s bloody bored, is what she is, openin’ <em>doors</em> and shovin’ musicians through ’em on any given Tuesday without so much as a ‘by your leave.’ Not much room for the sacred night when mortal man fancies himself master of all, I s’pose. He’s found too many ways to blow things up. So now she’s gone and taken up gamblin’, the bloody witch.” He ashed his cigarette and sighed. “I mean, I did bet though.”</p><p>“Is this a game to you, then?” Jimmy knew that he should leave it. But the idea of this horror being some higher-than-toff’s entertainment was just too much. “Because I’m sure as shite not havin’ any fun.”</p><p>Hades shrugged. “I imagine the ponies have better things to do than let you lose money on ’em too. You had a choice in the matter, and you stand to gain a lot more than a carrot and a rub-down if you win.”</p><p>Jimmy opened his mouth and shut it again. Thomas clung to him. It was so unlike the under butler he knew to do something so embarrassing as to <em>cling</em>. The thought tore at his chest. This was what he was fighting for. Thomas and Thomas alone. Why he had been allowed in the ring didn’t matter. “Fair enough.”</p><p>“Good! I always aspire to be fair.” Hades pitched his cig and rubbed his stubby hands together. Jimmy was slightly taken aback by his wedding ring, despite knowing he was married. “So, Mr. Kent, a soul for a soul.”</p><p>“Don’t you dare.” Thomas had found his voice at last and was staring between them, wide-eyed.</p><p>“Not his, Mr. Barrow,” the god soothed. And was it Jimmy’s imagination, or did he sound genuinely contrite? “That would rather defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?” he chuckled. “It’s the one he created that I’m after. That song shouldn’t be kickin’ around up there anyway, they wouldn’t know what to do with it like we do.”</p><p>“And if I…give it to you,” Jimmy pressed, unsure as to how exactly he could surrender it, “You’ll let us both go?”</p><p>“I’ll see you to the staircase, and no harm will come to you. What you do after that’s between you and them stairs. They’re fragile, you see. What’s made of faith can’t abide a doubter. You know all the rules already, dontcha? You go ahead, he goes behind. No matter what you see and hear, you don’t turn around until you’re out. You’ll have him back. But that part’s easy, innit?” Hades smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. “Do we have an accord?”</p><p>“Jimmy—”</p><p>“Don’t tell me you’re not worth a song, Thomas. Wrote it for you an’ all, didn’t I?”</p><p>Thomas blinked at him. “Really?” he whispered.</p><p>“Really. I know what I’m doing.” He rubbed the palm of Thomas’ hand with his thumb, turning back to Hades. “On the Styx,” he demanded.</p><p>Hades held up his hand. “On the waters of Mighty Styx, all this I have told the mortal Jimmy Kent, I do swear.” The Underworld shivered. Water dripped from his palm.</p><p>
  <em>So it is spoken. So it must be.</em>
</p><p>“Right then.” Hades clapped his hands. He breathed in, longer and harder than should have been physically possible. The thick fog in what Jimmy now realized was a garden disappeared into his mouth, leaving only faint tendrils of mist. That empty-page sky was back overhead, and the Styx flowed less than a hundred yards away. The Ferryman leaned on his barge pole, staring out from his empty hood. Ringed by little box hedges and gardenias, a piano stood on a stone plinth. Upon closer inspection, Jimmy recognized it as Mr. Davis’. “Give us a tune.”</p><p>He sat at the instrument and ran his fingers over the keys, remembering the way they felt. The Underworld was so silent it hurt. He felt eyes on him as he arranged his hands in the opening chord, felt ears straining to hear what he was about to do. An entire dimension holding its breath. He still didn’t know the ending, but he could feel it, just out of reach. It would be waiting for him, if he trusted it. He began to play.</p><p>The notes flowed out across the stillness, breathing on their own. They diffused into the air, burning up the lingering mist and painting the sky in every colour of summer. They sank into the ground beneath like rain, reaching out to carve themselves into the bones of the Underworld. The Styx ceased her flow, her glassy surface reflecting the face of her lover. Far away and no distance at all, huddled men dropped their guns. A woman stood paralyzed in her garden, arms reaching out to a son who wasn’t there. Lethe walked in silence beneath a frozen canopy, a moth seeking a lamp. Jimmy knew only music; this maddening, soul-burning, impossible music that rang in the very stones. He gave all he had to give, spoke aloud his essence. It freed him. The amalgamation of all his hidden pieces flowed from him like water, and it seemed absurd, in that moment, that he ever could have been ashamed. His love was a fact of the universe, part of the base reality of nature. Its melody wound through all he touched, in time with the heartbeat of the world. And when he came to the end, the part that had given him such trouble and consumed so many of his hours, the resolution was there. Simple. Obvious. Because Thomas was there, lips parted in mute wonder, and there had never been any other option.</p><p>When the last chord floated away into silence, he was ready. The water that trickled over the keys and onto his hands did not shock him with its chill. The pain in his chest as he felt his music drain from him was right, like a splinter being removed. Nothing in life, or death, is free. The song was the price for the man, and there had never been a contest. So when an empty voice in his ear whispered “Forget,” Jimmy let go.</p><p>He sat for a long moment, breathing in silence. There was nothing. The itch that had followed him for years was gone. He felt its absence like a missing limb. There would be time to mourn it, one way or another. But now it was time to go. He had a job to do. He stretched out his hand and Thomas took it, hauling him to his feet. No one spoke as Hades escorted them down to the river and onto the barge. Even the Ferryman moved in silence, nodding to Jimmy with something that may have been pride. The King of the Underworld eschewed the boat. Instead he walked across the mirrored black water, pausing to tip his hat to the depths. His beast stayed on the shore, whining softly.</p><p>Jimmy squeezed Thomas’ hand. It seemed smaller, somehow. More frail. His whole body was…less. Translucent around the edges, like an ink drawing marred by water damage. The reality that Thomas was dead,<em> gone,</em> hit him afresh. It had been so easy, seeing him, holding his hand, to forget that he walked with a ghost. Thomas’ body was up there, somewhere, waiting for its occupant. He lifted the near-weightless shade onto the shore, trying desperately to feel him.</p><p>“Jimmy,” Thomas whispered, unsteady on his feet.</p><p>“I’ve got you,” he said. He would repeat it until he knew it was true.</p><p>The back staircase from Downton rose out of the sand straight into the sky. It faded into nothingness as it went up, as if it were a sketch where the artist had left off. Its emptiness beckoned, a cup waiting to be filled. Jimmy was quite determined not to oblige it.</p><p>“You know the rules, Mr. Kent. I can only show you the door.” Hades gestured to the stairs and bowed, smiling with all his little teeth.</p><p>“What’s up there?” Jimmy was certain he heard whispers.</p><p>“I really couldn’t say. That’s all kept in here.” He tapped the side of Jimmy’s head. Jimmy flinched. “I promised you’d go unmolested by me or mine. Never said nothin’ about what you go and do all by your lonesome. But that’s always been your trouble, hasn’t it, Mr. Kent?”</p><p>Jimmy refused to dignify that with an answer. Instead he pressed Thomas to him as best he could, one more time. “Promise you’ll follow me,” he murmured into his neck. “No matter what.”</p><p>“I promise.” Thomas’ voice echoed, as if from far away. “Don’t go lookin’ back, now.”</p><p>“I promise I won’t.” He forced his arms to his sides and turned towards the stairs. He could tackle stairs. This was meant to be the easy part. The part that only a fool could manage to ruin. But he was a fool, wasn’t he? And something in his stomach was crawling around before he had even set foot on the first step.</p><p>“Good luck to you. I mean that,” said Hades. “Truly.” His easy playfulness had leached out, and for the first time Jimmy sensed his unfathomable age, the loss he carried with him.</p><p>“Thank you,” Jimmy replied. Because what else was there to say?</p><p>He grasped the rail. “I love you, Thomas,” he said softly.</p><p>No reply came. Jimmy felt foolish for expecting one. He swallowed the bile that burned his throat and he started to climb.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Hades is just out here taking the dog for a walk and missing his wife. Fight me.</p><p>The poem Thomas is reading at the beginning is When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd by Walt Whitman.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Doubt</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Merry Christmas. I got you some horror and sadness.</p>
<p>Warnings for more of the same. If you got to this point you know what's up.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>One foot in front of the other. That was all it was. Step after step, his footfalls thunderous in the silent air. Up and up and up, many times taller than Downton. He had stopped counting flights after fourteen. His legs and back ached, but the signal was muffled on the way to his brain. Adrenaline prickled his skin. He—they, it was they, Thomas was <em>right there</em>—had reached the sky. There was nothing but white all around, and it was oddly…close. Jimmy reached out and touched it. It was almost solid, like half-formed gelatin. He wanted so badly to ask Thomas what he made of it.</p>
<p>One foot in front of the other. Easy. The whiteness solidified into walls around him, paint flaking off in the corners. It was suffocating to be boxed in after so long in endless empty space. Jimmy breathed slowly, trying to still his heart. It smelled musty, not at all like Downton’s stairs. Because they weren’t anymore. There was a carpet now, beige and threadbare, and a creaky wooden bannister. Jimmy skipped the step that held a long pendulum and several counterweights. Whispering leaked from behind the green wallpaper, and someone with a high voice hummed <em>My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean</em> from one story above him. He knew this staircase, though not well. He had seen it over a broad shoulder in another man’s memory, trying to look anywhere but those pebble eyes. He let his hand reach out behind, just a little bit. Just to show Thomas that he was with him.</p>
<p>The dark-haired boy stopped humming and clutched his bachelor button crown when Jimmy rounded the corner. He was wearing tiny livery. Jimmy wanted to pick him up.</p>
<p>“Do you think he’ll like it?” he asked, blinking up at Jimmy with big, pale eyes.</p>
<p>“Who?” His voice sounded like he had been eating sand.</p>
<p>“Jimmy.”</p>
<p>“I’ll bet he will.”</p>
<p>Thomas grinned. He was missing both his eye teeth. “Don’t tell Da.”</p>
<p>“I won’t,” Jimmy promised, as the boy scampered off up the stairs.</p>
<p>“What did you <em>do</em>?” little Thomas shouted a moment later, distraught. “Why do you always have t’ break things?!”</p>
<p>“I didn’t mean to!” </p>
<p>Jimmy ran up. He knew that voice, even if it was strange hearing it coming from a mouth not his own. Sure enough, a fair-haired child was tucked in the corner, hugging his knees. Thomas cradled a broken watch in his hands like a baby bird. The flower crown lay forgotten on the carpet.</p>
<p>“It’s alright,” Thomas said, with the same calm finality he had as a man. “I’ll take it up.”</p>
<p>“I’m sorry,” six-year-old Jimmy snivelled. “Please don’t go up.”</p>
<p>“He’s gonna find out sooner or later; better me than you. D’you like your flowers?”</p>
<p>The boy nodded, wiping his nose on his sleeve. Thomas picked up the crown and arranged it as best he could in the blonde curls with one hand, the other clutching the watch to his chest. He turned to the adult Jimmy, standing frozen on the stairs. “Will you come with me? I don’t fancy goin’ alone.”</p>
<p>Jimmy nodded dumbly, feeling a pang of guilt at leaving his younger self crying on the floor. He reminded himself, weakly, that he <em>was</em> him, and therefore it didn’t count. They climbed the next flight in silence. There was a heavy door at the landing, which Thomas opened to reveal a mass of ticking clocks, all fusing into each other. He stepped through and turned back, his little face all cut and bruised. “Run, Jimmy,” he said as he shut it behind him.</p>
<p>Jimmy dove for the handle, but the door was already fading, melting into that arsenic-coloured wallpaper. “Thomas!” he shouted, banging his fist on the wall. He could hear the thundering voice, the crack of a belt. Screams. Over and over, between incoherent begging and sobbing. The wall did not budge or crack, even as Jimmy’s fist left a bloody streak behind. There was nothing he could do, stuck on the other side while the little boy’s whimpers faded into silence.</p>
<p>He pressed his forehead against the hissing wallpaper, tears rolling down his cheeks. <em>Keep going. This isn’t real. It doesn’t even make sense, you’re not the same age.</em> But it <em>was</em> real, that was the problem. It was a disjointed dream version, cobbled together from Jimmy’s limited knowledge, but the hurt was real. Jimmy standing by while Thomas got hurt was real. And when he cared to do something about it, it was always too little, too late. But he could do something now.</p>
<p>He peered up through the stairwell, taking deep breaths. It only darkened from here. But it was alright. He had a job to do. “Okay,” he said aloud. One foot in front of the other. He could still hear sobbing from the landing below.</p>
<p>He climbed in silence. He wondered if he ought to talk to Thomas. Presumably, Thomas could hear and see him, so perhaps it would be good to say something. On the other hand, Jimmy wasn’t sure how well he could hold up carrying on a one-sided conversation if things like <em>that</em> were going to keep happening.</p>
<p>The stairs creaked. One foot in front of the other. The ambient light dimmed, leaving him in twilight gloom with only the prison-bar shadows of the bannister for company. The wallpaper peeled away in swatches, wet and mouldy. His feet squelched on the carpet. He coughed at the smell, holding his sleeve over his face. The whispers were getting louder.</p>
<p>“You can’t do things like that, Jimmy. I know you didn’t understand, but you do now. You’re a proper lad an’ all, en’t that right? You was just confused.” Dad’s voice came from behind the wall. “I don’t want to see you hangin’ around with that boy anymore.”</p>
<p>Jimmy shivered and picked up his pace. He remembered Jack playing house with him in the abandoned shed. It had been a kiss on the cheek, tame as you please. But it wasn’t so much the kiss itself that had upset Dad. It was the fact that Jimmy was playing the wife. He had been even more upset when Jimmy tried to smooth it over by explaining that they took turns at it.</p>
<p>The wallpaper fell in half-disintegrated heaps on the stairs, creating leaning piles of decay that threatened to trip him. The smell was overwhelming. It choked him as he pressed further and further into the miasma, slowly turning from mildew to rotten eggs. He didn’t immediately notice that there was no longer carpet on the stairs, just thick smears of mud.</p>
<p>“Jimmy!” his mother called from somewhere. Echoes proliferated here, as if he were inside a bell and not a cramped staircase. It had gotten narrower, hadn’t it?</p>
<p>He clung to the rail to keep from slipping in the mire. They were barely stairs, now, so much as a very steep slope. He climbed, trying to block out the whispers by force of will alone. They were maddening, crawling up his spine and drilling into his skull. There were a thousand voices, all talking at once, but they were in agreement enough that the words ‘stupid’ and ‘who do you think you are’ pounded behind his eyes.  He thought he heard Thomas slip in the muck behind him at one point, and began to turn before he caught himself, heart beating out of his ribs. <em>Focus. They’re not real. It’s not real.</em></p>
<p>“Who do you think you are?” Lord Grantham boomed from the landing. “Do you really believe that you could take him with you? After <em>that?</em>”</p>
<p>“It is so very like James, my lord,” Carson drawled from his side, “to think he could succeed where a greater man failed. And with no effort on his part, I should imagine.”</p>
<p>It wasn’t real. They couldn’t do anything. It wasn’t real. Jimmy pushed past them. They were solid enough, but they let him go. He could feel their eyes following him.</p>
<p>“He’s not behind you, James,” Grantham’s voice echoed up the stairs. “Did you really think yourself so special?”</p>
<p>The walls hissed. <em>Stupid.</em> He struggled up the slope, gripping the rail for dear life and grinding his teeth. It was a trick, a trap. He wouldn’t be fooled. <em>Coward.</em> It was just a trick. It wasn’t real. They were some apparition dragged from his memory, a strange collage of reality like a daybreak dream. Just like the mud below his feet that smelled of copper, and the wet air that smelled like death. He wasn’t in France, and neither was Carson. It was all just a strange dream, and he had a job to do. It didn’t stop him from straining his ears for any sound behind him.</p>
<p>The silence meant nothing. It meant absolutely nothing. Just like the wall of the trench before him.</p>
<p>He stared at the ladder. He had to believe. One hand on the rung.</p>
<p>
  <em>And what if you’d been tricked?</em>
</p>
<p>Next rung. He had a job to do.</p>
<p>
  <em>What if you made it all the way out and she wasn’t there?</em>
</p>
<p>One more rung. Each time, he told himself just one more rung. What did they know? He had his instructions, and he would follow them. He could be brave. Brave for Thomas.</p>
<p>
  <em>Well, I’d just have to go back in and have it out with Hades, wouldn’t I, Mr. Barrow?</em>
</p>
<p>As if it could ever be that simple. As if he was anything more than a piece on the board in someone else’s ineffable game. But the rules, for now at least, were clear. He wouldn’t get caught out for breaking them.</p>
<p>He hauled himself up over the top into enemy fire. Bullets whizzed by, ending their trajectories in wet thuds. Jimmy didn’t look to see whether they were ending in mud or flesh. <em>Not real.</em> He could manage this nightmare. He’d been having it for years. He walked, stepping over corpses and barbed wire to the next ladder. Up again. One rung at a time.</p>
<p>“What’re you doing out here all alone?” O’Brien peered at him from the lip of the trench. She sat with her sewing, completely unbothered.</p>
<p>“I’m not alone.”</p>
<p>“Whatever you say.”</p>
<p>Jimmy’s hands shook. One foot in front of the other. One rung at a time.</p>
<p>“Who the fuck do you think you are?” Briggs shrieked from where he hung, crucified in the wire fence. His guts spilled into the earth like some long, wet parasite that had crawled up to feast on him. “You think you’re better than us?”</p>
<p>Jimmy scrambled up the ladder, stomach roiling and whispers pounding in his head.</p>
<p>“You fool enough to think you’re not alone, you jumped-up little shit?! You’re already dead! This <em>is</em> your Hell, Kent!”</p>
<p>He ran, Briggs’ screams echoing around him. Was this damnation? Endless stairs to be climbed for an unreachable goal, haunted by spectres? The sun, wherever it was, was going down. The wind was changing.</p>
<p>Lieutenant Hyles rose from the muck like a sea creature from the depths. “Coward,” he hissed. “You never should have lived to meet him.”</p>
<p>Jimmy screamed, long and wordless as he ran. He put his hands over his ears and stumbled towards the next ladder, and the next and the next. One after the other, stacked neatly like a house of cards. Still the voices swirled around him, scratching in his skull. <em>Coward.</em> <em>Alone. Who do you think you are?</em></p>
<p>It felt like every person he had ever known, everyone who had ever put him down, every voice that had ever sneered his name was whispering to him, scratching his sins into his flesh. The darkness crept in around him like rot, like infection around a wound. He could barely see what was in front of him now, stumbling along in the mud, up and up and up. Ladder after ladder after ladder until—blessedly—stairs. It was so dark he could barely make them out. <em>Alone.</em> He felt his way along the carved bannister, smooth wood beneath his trembling fingers. He strained his eyes, looking for anything to distract him from that inky shadows that made his skin crawl. He tripped and went down hard on one knee. There was scrabbling and movement around him. Rats. <em>Coward.</em> Why did there have to be rats? He wanted to cry. He wanted Mum to light a candle for him and wake him from this dream.</p>
<p>He clutched his jacket tighter around him, little good it did. He had to get up. There was nothing to do but move. But there was something in his pocket. His hand closed with frantic relief around Thomas’ lighter. How could he have forgotten?   </p>
<p>The tiny flame illuminated his own face in the mirror. His whole body, really. All alone. <em>No, no, no, that’s not fair— </em>It didn’t count. That couldn’t count as looking back. He hadn’t doubted. <em>But you did. You are.</em> </p>
<p>The entire staircase was hung with mirrors, all shapes and sizes, reflecting him back and forth ad infinitum. Just him. No Thomas. But ghosts didn’t show up in mirrors, did they? Yes, that had to be it. It was just another trick, another trap. Thomas was there. Thomas was right behind him, just like he promised. His senses couldn’t be trusted, not in this place. He was surrounded by apparitions, by impossible things. He stared at his own face, haggard and exhausted, a streak of mud across his cheek. That was real enough. That damp, working-class suit was his very own, that hair that was getting darker with age and plastered to his skull, those chapped, trembling hands—all him. <em>Ugly.</em></p>
<p>Jimmy blinked and forced his feet to work. Up and up and up. His own form stalked him in too many flickering copies.</p>
<p>“My, my, the bloom <em>has </em>gone off the rose. Or should I say the lavender?”</p>
<p>Jimmy nearly dropped the lighter. Lady Anstruther looked <em>wrong</em> lit from below, like her face was on upside-down. He swallowed against the dryness in his mouth. His throat constricted in the motion and refused to un-stick.</p>
<p>“It’s a shame, really. But that’s always the way with the lower classes, I suppose. By the time they’ve grown up, they’ve grown old.” She sighed and shook her head. “I do sympathize. I know what it feels like to pass your sell-by date. At least there are always footmen who would guzzle year-old milk if they thought it made them look manly.”</p>
<p>Jimmy pushed past her, but she followed at his heels. He tried not to think about how he could hear her footsteps just fine, or the way the smell of her invaded him.</p>
<p>“Do tell me, Jimmy, was that what it was about? Or do you just love being a whore so much you couldn’t resist?”</p>
<p>“Shut up,” he rasped. One foot it front of the other. <em>Who do you think you are?</em> It wasn’t real, she couldn’t do anything. <em>Stupid.</em> She didn’t own him. <em>Ugly.</em> She didn’t. <em>Whore.</em></p>
<p>“What would you have done if dear Alfred hadn’t walked in? Would you have spread your legs and thought of your own face?”</p>
<p>“Shut up!”</p>
<p>“It’s all you were ever good for, Jimmy. And it wasn’t even <em>that good.</em>”</p>
<p>He sped up, even knowing in his bones that he couldn’t outrun her. <em>Coward.</em> Exhaustion dragged at his every step, and the whispers threatened to drown him.</p>
<p>“No wonder you’re here all alone,” she said, hot breath in his ear.</p>
<p>He cried, then. Great, screaming sobs that jerked his entire body. He cried the way he had in the woodshed, after the first time, when he thought about running away. But he didn’t run away. Instead he told himself that it was all a good thing, that the preferential treatment was well worth it. And men couldn’t <em>do</em> it if they didn’t want to; that was just nature. It was fine. Brilliant, really. And if he sometimes sat in the icy tub late at night, scrubbing his skin until the cloth was pink, that was between him and the bathroom mirror.</p>
<p>“Leave me alone!” He sounded like a child in his own ears. <em>Whore.</em></p>
<p>“Suit yourself. You’ll want me back; you’ll see.”</p>
<p>Jimmy would not want her back. He would <em>not.</em> Not even when he left her behind and silence descended, the whispering retreating to the occasional hiss at the outer limit of his hearing. Sometimes, something dripped. It was pitch-black now, the only light coming from his flame and casting distorted shadows on the narrow steps. His footsteps were so loud. So loud and so singular. <em>Alone.</em></p>
<p>The lighter flickered. He was alone. Everything around him told him it was so. There was just him and the dark and endless stairs, with nothing to do but climb forever and tell himself that there was a way out, that the world was fair after all. That he could have Thomas back. And hadn’t it always been wishful thinking, that death could be undone? And even if it could, that Thomas would still want to come with him, after everything? Maybe Jimmy never could have made him happy, never could have truly satisfied. Maybe he had always been alone.</p>
<p>The flame went out. He groped his way along, stomach heaving with every movement. The metal railing was so cold. Cold like the Lethe. Cold like Thomas’ hand. <em>It’s unnatural, what you want to do.</em> He was coming apart, his ribs cracking one by one. <em>Selfish little boy.</em> There was nothing. There was nothing but him and this Hell. <em>Alone.</em> He was all alone. The stairs leaned and trembled beneath his feet.   </p>
<p>One foot in front of the other. It was in vain. Everything he had done had been in vain. He walked numbly, his breath shuddering as the stairs pitched. “Please,” he whispered. “Please.” He didn’t know what he was asking for. A sign? An end? Deliverance? The silence, the <em>lack</em> drove into him like a knife. How could he have tears left to cry? Each one burned his eyes like alcohol as he squeezed them out. But still they fell. And still he walked. What else could he do? He would not fuck this up. <em>Stupid.</em> He would <em>not.</em> Up and up and up. One foot in front of the other.</p>
<p>The landing stretched. It was no longer a landing, but a long hallway he groped along. And…was that light? He felt his heart lift for the first time in what felt like years. There <em>was</em> light. Faint and cold, but there it was, an indisputable beacon. Jimmy almost laughed. He could do this. He could reach the light. Whispers and ghosts be damned, he could make it. He ran.   </p>
<p>Light spilled through the cracked door, the cool grey kind of early morning. A figure stood silhouetted against the brightness, tall and straight-backed, his livery immaculate.</p>
<p>“Thomas,” Jimmy breathed, skidding to a stop.</p>
<p>“Hello.” His eyes pinched with his smile. His <em>oh, you silly boy</em> smile. The one that made his lips all wiggly. Jimmy’s heart didn’t know whether to soar or sink.</p>
<p>“Is this—did we do it?”</p>
<p>“No, Jimmy.”</p>
<p>“But…I didn’t look back, I swear I didn’t!”</p>
<p>“I know you didn’t. That’s the trouble. It wouldn’t have changed anything if you had. Might’ve saved time, really.” He was so calm and composed, so unlike the fragile man Jimmy had found in the river. It was <em>wrong.</em></p>
<p>“I did what I did for a reason, Jimmy,” Thomas said carefully. “It weren’t by accident.”</p>
<p>“You’re gonna get better, though. I’m gonna help you and we can be happy…”</p>
<p>“You can be such a child, sometimes. And I loved you for it, I truly did.” Thomas caressed Jimmy’s cheek with his knuckles. Blood seeped through his cuff. “But I would have been better off if you left well enough alone.”</p>
<p>Loved. Past tense.</p>
<p>“You <em>will</em> bury me, Jimmy, you know it’s true. Let me go. It’s alright.”</p>
<p>Jimmy reached his hand out behind him, begging silently for a touch, a sign, anything that the man before him wasn’t the one who was supposed to be behind. No touch came. There was nothing, just empty silence while Thomas looked at him with pity. <em>Alone.</em> He would bury him. The knowledge prickled his skin like an itch. <em>Who do you think you are?</em> He would bury him. It had been in vain. The boards beneath his feet groaned.</p>
<p>“But you promised,” he whispered. It wasn’t fair. They’d been over this. “You promised!”</p>
<p>“Don’t be a brat, Jimmy.” Thomas’ face hardened. “You never even considered what <em>I</em> want, did you?”</p>
<p>“No,” Jimmy said softly. “I didn’t.” But they <em>had </em>been over this. They had both promised. It was wrong, so wrong. And since when had Jimmy being a brat been a problem for Thomas? He looked past him through the door. Long grass swayed outside, rows of trees fading into the distance. No more stairs. No more horror. The way out, where only a fool would look back. Only a soppy Greek idiot would fall for this. “Because I <em>am</em> a brat,” he said, no longer talking to the apparition before him. “And you love me for it.”  </p>
<p>Love. Present tense. Like it was supposed to be. No other tenses allowed.</p>
<p>“It’s getting tiresome,” not-Thomas replied dryly.</p>
<p>The voice was wrong. Obviously. That voice was for other people. Stupid, unimportant people who weren’t Jimmy. People he would laugh at with Jimmy later. Because there was a <em>with Jimmy</em> and there was a <em>later.</em> Because Jimmy was a brat and Jimmy said so. There were certain facts of the universe. The sun rose in the East. Winter preceded spring. And Thomas Barrow couldn’t deny Jimmy Kent anything it was in his power to give, including giving life another chance.   </p>
<p>“You’d never get tired of me, old man.” It had always been an endearment. One day it would be an accurate one. Because Jimmy had walked into Hell for it and Jimmy bloody said so.</p>
<p>He marched past the spectre and into the orchard. Orange trees bent their branches in the wind, rustling together above his head. They stretched over rolling hills to the horizon in perfect lines, long grass swaying between the rows. The whispering in his skull was gone. This still wasn’t Earth. Everything around him felt fragile, delayed, like an echo trapped in a soap bubble. If he moved too roughly, he might break it.</p>
<p>An orange rolled to his feet, wrapped in silver thread that trailed off in the grass. When he picked it up the thread tightened and cut at his hands like razor wire. But he mustn’t drop it. <em>Nine minutes.</em> Yes. He couldn’t <em>see</em> the eyeless beings, nor the tapestry they wove. They existed just outside his peripheral vision; looking at them was like trying to catch sunlight in a jar. But he knew what they offered. He pulled.</p>
<p>Thread unraveled. The soap bubble burst. The ground fell away, the orchard folding in on itself and being swallowed up by nothing. Jimmy’s clothes flapped around him, though there was no sound of rushing wind. He was rising up towards the surface, where his head would break the waves and he could breathe again.</p>
<p>Long, cool fingers grasped his wrist. He had never been alone.      </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Time</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Jimmy was flying. Not through the air, but through snippets of reality, like he had been sucked into a film reel. He saw his boarding house, the flash of his own jacket through his landlady’s door. There was a telephone, a word. He was zipping through the line like a spark, garbled nonsense ringing in his ears. Carson’s office. Servants’ hall. Breakfast. Thomas. There was a thread. It cut like piano wire, stretching out in branches like the veins of a mechanical beast. <em>Nudge it. Other way, other way, other way.</em> Everyone was moving, but Thomas paused. <em>Nudge it.</em> He opened his mouth. Molesley turned around, looking a bit surprised. <em>Three minutes.</em></p>
<p>
  <em>Not good enough.</em>
</p>
<p>Slices of the day flipped by. Anna needed scissors. Jimmy pressed his fist against the window like he could compel the train to move. Thomas entered his room. Molesley and Baxter strolled down the road, following the thread. <em>Nudge it.</em> Molesley spoke. Baxter paused. Jimmy saw it like a shade, saw her shake her head and move on. Don’t be silly, Phyllis. <em>No, no, no, no, no, you pay attention.</em> Jimmy shouted, underwater. <em>Shove it.</em> She saw him. He was sure of it. She ran, dignity be damned. Down the men’s hall. The bolt flew off the door. <em>Six minutes. </em>Torn cloth. A knot in a snapped thread.</p>
<p>It was dark. He floated, weightless, in the nothing that surrounded him. There was a light around Baxter, where she knelt, emanating from her outstretched hand. A pile of sand sat before her on the ground that wasn’t there. She looked up at him.</p>
<p>“Nine minutes,” she said, smiling through her tears.</p>
<p>In her palm were nine grains of sand, shining like stars.</p>
<p>His knees hit the ground in Downton’s kitchen yard. It was warm. He was warm and dry, kneeling in the dirt with his bag beside him. The farmer’s horse pulled the cart away. A long shadow from some crates loomed against the wall in the afternoon sun. Jimmy rose, shaking uncontrollably. The brightness and colour hurt his eyes.</p>
<p>The door squeaked. The boards in the passage groaned. Daisy poked her head out of the kitchen, her eyebrows jumping to her hairline at the sight of him. He could practically <em>feel</em> her breath, even though she was feet away.</p>
<p>“Jimmy? Lor’, you look awful.”</p>
<p>“Where is he?” His voice sounded like a rusty door-hinge.</p>
<p>“What, Mr. Barrow? He’s taken ill. They said it were flu, but…that’s not true, is it?” She searched Jimmy’s face. He had no energy left to hide himself. Her eyes widened.</p>
<p>“Is he up there?” he managed.</p>
<p>“Yes.” She put a gentle hand on his elbow and steered him towards the stairs. Bile rose up at the very thought of climbing them. Mrs. Hughes stood at the bottom with a woman dressed in black.</p>
<p>“—<em>not </em>be requiring such services. I should like to know who exactly it was that contacted you.”</p>
<p>“Oh, one hears things,” Hecate said, flashing her predatory smile. “Ah, there he is. I knew you’d be stubborn enough.” She nodded to him, shaking a tiny purse that sounded as if it had an entire smithy inside. Mrs. Hughes looked between them in confusion. “It was well worth it, even if I do have to split it with His Nibs.” She gestured to the floor.</p>
<p>Jimmy swayed, his brow furrowed. His thoughts were racing. Part of him wanted to dash up the stairs and dance for joy. Another part was seconds from collapsing into a heap on the floor. Part of him was distantly curious, as if he were watching it all as a film. “But…”</p>
<p>“Who bet against you? Everyone else, of course. Have a nice day, Mrs. Hughes, Mrs. Parker.”</p>
<p>“What did you call me?!” Daisy demanded at Hecate’s retreating back.</p>
<p>Jimmy laughed hysterically. He couldn’t stop. It was mad and impossible and Thomas was <em>alive</em>, and half of him was certain he had dreamt all of it, that he was dreaming still. He only realized that he was crying and that his bag had disappeared when he was halfway up the stairs under Mrs. Hughes’ support. He took back his own weight. Stairs he could do. Oh God.</p>
<p>He tripped over the last step before the landing, stumbled down the hall to Thomas’ door. It stood closed and unassuming, identical to its neighbours. No one else knew how special it was. No one else knew who lived here, not really. He opened it slowly, without knocking.</p>
<p>Night-dark hair lay on the pillow like spilled ink. Thomas’ face was pale and clammy in sleep, but his pink lips were softly parted, as if waiting for a kiss. His chest rose and fell gently, almost imperceptibly, beneath the blanket. He was <em>here.</em> He was perfect.</p>
<p>Jimmy rushed to his side, holding Thomas’ face like it was made of glass. He pressed his nose into soft black hair, relishing the scent of him, the feel of his man in his arms. He barely registered Baxter getting up, or Mrs. Hughes starting to say something when he crawled on the bed with his jacket and shoes on. He did hear Mr. Carson bluster in and huff and puff about it, but he chose to ignore him. None of it mattered. Thomas was here and solid and warm and Jimmy’s entire body ached.</p>
<p>He woke up when Baxter came with tea. “I thought you might like some,” she said softly.</p>
<p>“Thanks,” Jimmy rasped, sitting up. He rubbed his face. Thomas lay still and oblivious to the world. It tugged at the knot of fear in his chest.</p>
<p>“Dr. Clarkson said he might sleep for a long time,” said Baxter, as if reading his mind.</p>
<p>He nodded and took his cup, trying not to let the china rattle too much. His eyes were puffy and so dry that they itched. Baxter ended up forcing two cups of tea and several sandwiches on him, for which he was grateful despite his vague grumbling. When he thanked her quietly for finding Thomas, she didn't ask how he knew. They would never speak about it, not for the rest of their lives. The food soothed his stomach, but also reminded him jarringly of the real world where people had to eat and sleep and go to work. He supposed he should call the club.</p>
<p>He insisted on staying in Thomas’ room for the night. Carson kicked up a fuss, but all Jimmy had to do was mention a certain phone call and he shut up. The idea that he had ever been intimidated, scared even, by that windbag was laughable. Now that he had looked a god in the eye, staring Mr. Carson out of his own office was a matter of basic self-respect. Calling Mr. Dean to explain why he had fallen off the face of the Earth was as straightforward as ordering a pint. There was a time when he would have wrinkled his nose at hearing his boss’ nasal voice go from snappish to cooing as he explained himself. When phrases like ‘<em>very</em> dear friend’ and ‘I knew he got low sometimes, but not like that’ and ‘I weren’t even thinkin’ about tomorrow, I needed to go to him’ would never have passed his lips on pain of death. Now, he just felt understood. In the end, he didn’t even have to bring up his possibly-terrible-possibly-brilliant idea.     </p>
<p>“You know, Jimmy dear—” that <em>did</em> make him wrinkle his nose “—if he’s such a competent man as all that, surely London would be the place for him, not that backwater. In fact…”</p>
<p>Jimmy hung up, satisfied that he was <em>doing</em> something about the real world whats and hows. He could give Thomas a plan, if he wanted it. Thomas liked plans.</p>
<p>He headed for the stairs and almost lost his sandwiches. He hoped that not all stairs would be like this, or that it would pass quickly at least. He couldn’t afford to be standing around, pressing his forehead to the plaster and breathing through the nausea every time he went up a floor. At least here everyone was giving him a wide berth.</p>
<p>“No!” The muffled cry reached him down the hall. Baxter’s soothing voice followed. Jimmy ran to the door and slipped inside.</p>
<p>“I can’t, Phyllis,” Thomas whispered, face pressed to her shoulder. “I had this dream, this mad dream, and I c-can’t…” He sobbed into her dress.</p>
<p>“Shh, Thomas, I’ve got you,” Baxter petted his hair. “There’s someone here for you. I think you’ll want to see him.”</p>
<p>Thomas shook his head and squirmed away from her. His weak hands fumbled at the blankets, trying to bury himself. Jimmy wordlessly came around the side of the bed and pulled him to his chest. Thomas started and stuttered, half-formed questions tumbling from his lips. Jimmy just hugged harder until he quieted, face pressed into Jimmy’s chest.</p>
<p>“I go down for fifteen bloody minutes,” Jimmy murmured into his hair. “You’re the king of bad timing, you know that?” His face was wet.  </p>
<p>Thomas let out something that an optimist might call laugh-adjacent and burrowed deeper. He was so warm. So warm and real and perfect. There was his pulse, beating softly in his exposed neck when Jimmy cupped his jaw. There was the smell of his pomade, the residue of cigarettes. It was all there, all as it should be, and yet nothing like it should be. Thomas shouldn’t need help picking up a water glass. He shouldn’t need to be coaxed to drink. But Jimmy still did it, pouring soothing nonsense into his ear, even as his own heart stuttered and threatened to give out. He had a job to do.</p>
<p>Baxter shut the door on her way out. The murmured “I’ll get something for him to eat” and the click startled Thomas into remembering himself. He pulled away from Jimmy minutely and twisted his hands in his lap.</p>
<p>“Sorry,” he whispered. He ducked his head away to look blankly at the skirting board.</p>
<p>“Shh. None o’ that, now.” Jimmy rubbed his arms. He could only hope that the repetitive motion was as soothing for Thomas as it was for him.</p>
<p>“I just…I had a dream. Made me confused, but then you…You’re touching me.” Thomas gestured vaguely, his lip trembling.</p>
<p>“I had a dream too. There was a river and a bloke with a dog. And stairs. Too many fuckin’ stairs.” Thomas gaped. Jimmy smiled. It was a weak thing, cracked around the edges and watery, but it was there. He took the lighter from his pocket and pressed it into Thomas’ hands. “Reckon that thing’s out of fuel,” he said softly.</p>
<p>“So that…all that…”</p>
<p>“Yeah.”</p>
<p>“Fuck,” Thomas whispered. He turned the lighter over and over in his long fingers. “You…” he trailed off, swallowing. “Tell me. Please.”</p>
<p>He didn’t have to explain what he was asking for. Jimmy cradled Thomas’ face in his hands. “I love you,” he murmured against his mouth. It was a chaste kiss, a gentle press of lips broken by hitching breaths and wet with tears. They both had awful breath. Jimmy never wanted to pull away.</p>
<p>It was easier, in a way, to sit there on the bed like the universe hadn’t been flipped upside down. It was easy to casually (not at all casually) bring up the new venture his boss was getting into, that would need a manager. Preferably a manager of certain persuasions. And that Jimmy had been saving for a proper flat. You know, incidentally. It was easy to confiscate Thomas’ cigarettes until he ate something resembling a meal, up to the point where Thomas complied and Jimmy went to light him one. The lighter could be ignored. The dud match after dud match that Jimmy discarded could not. The completely dry letter he pulled from his pocket with trembling fingers to find nothing but a page of running, illegible ink demanded attention.</p>
<p>In the end, it took two days for Thomas to acknowledge it, all of it, fully. Jimmy found his serenity when he did a bit unnerving, though he supposed it was better than the alternative.</p>
<p>“I just wanted someone to give me a chance,” Thomas said quietly, as Jimmy gently brushed his hair in the morning light. “And someone did. I know you care, and that it would take a lot for you to throw me over. More than havin’ to break into Hell and come get me. It doesn’t mean I feel good or even alright, but I think…I think I <em>will</em>. I think I <em>can.</em> Does that make any sense?”</p>
<p>“Yeah. I think so. And don’t go on about throwin’ you over, you’re stuck with me, remember?” Jimmy kissed the soft skin below his ear. He would never get tired of doing that.</p>
<p>It took an orange for Jimmy to break down. The delicate binding that had kept everything lashed to the deck snapped because of a little boy and an orange.</p>
<p>“Hello, Mr. Bawwow. Here you are, to make you feel better.” It wasn’t George’s fault. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Jimmy quietly left the room.</p>
<p>Andy was the one who found him. The nameless door he had pushed through for sanctuary was, as luck would have it, the footman’s bedroom.</p>
<p>“Are you alright?” He had a truly stupid face.</p>
<p>“Dandy. Why wouldn’t I be? Everything’s fine,” Jimmy insisted, sucking in air and hugging his knees.</p>
<p>“Right. People usually cry in my room because they’re fine.” The great lump had the audacity to sit down on the floor with him. “I think lately I’ve had enough of people telling me nothing’s wrong when something obviously is.”</p>
<p>Andy had a pinched, tired look about his face that Jimmy hadn’t noticed before. He remembered a fleeting vision of the young man kicking a door in and dashing off down the hallway. He must have been in this room, or on his way to or from, when it happened. Jimmy wasn’t sure which option was worse. Perhaps Andy wondered, too.</p>
<p>“’M sorry.” He meant it. “I’ll get out.”</p>
<p>“You don’t have to.”</p>
<p>“I should. Lady Mary’s gone, yeah?”</p>
<p>“Ages ago. Is there anything…” Andy trailed off, biting his lip before he steeled himself and pressed on. “Is there anything I can do? For either of you?” The sincerity of it hurt. Jimmy wasn’t the only one trying to do better.</p>
<p>“Not really.” Jimmy rubbed his face and pressed his forehead to his knees. It was easier to address the backs of his eyelids. “Just treat him like a normal person, y’know? He hates pity.”</p>
<p>“Okay. What about you?”</p>
<p>What about him? “This—this mad thing happened, alright?” He wasn’t sure why he was confiding in Andy. There had been a time when Jimmy had only known him via Thomas’ letters, and had disliked him on general principle. “And no one understands about it. Except Thomas. And I can’t tell anyone else or they’d call me a nutter. And it wouldn’t matter anyway ’cause they weren’t <em>there.</em>”</p>
<p>“So…” God, Andy was <em>trying</em>, bless him. Bloody Andy. “This thing…Did you…talk to Thomas about it?”</p>
<p>“Not really.”</p>
<p>“Well maybe start with that?”</p>
<p>“That’s your advice?” Jimmy asked dully, picking his head up from his knees. He would give it to Andy; he was finding being annoyed much easier than having an existential crisis.</p>
<p>Andy shrugged. “Seemed like the sort of thing Mr. Barrow would say.”</p>
<p>“Nah,” Jimmy said distantly. “’S not nearly condescending enough. You’ve gotta work on your delivery, mate.”</p>
<p>“I’ll defer to your, ah, <em>expertise.</em>”</p>
<p>“That’s more like it.” He almost smiled.</p>
<p>He tottered back to Thomas’ room in the long shadows of the evening. Thomas sat reading, looking so painfully ordinary but for the bandages at his wrists. Jimmy loved the lock of hair that flopped over his forehead with a ferocity that he was quite certain was abnormal.</p>
<p>“You alright, love?” Thomas’ voice was soft and unsure, testing the endearment like he would ice on a pond. “You disappeared.”</p>
<p>Jimmy’s heart did something unseemly. He shook his head.</p>
<p>Thomas set his book on the nightstand and opened his arms. Jimmy would later be proud of himself for removing his jacket and toeing off his shoes before he crawled between them.</p>
<p>“Just…that <em>happened,</em>” he murmured shakily into Thomas’ chest.</p>
<p>“Yes.” A scar-roughened hand rubbed against his neck. He was so very warm.</p>
<p>“It’s mad.”</p>
<p>“Yes.”</p>
<p>“I’m mad,” Jimmy whispered. His voice rang childish in his own ears.</p>
<p>“Quite possibly. But so am I, then, I s’pose. And that’s alright. We can be mad together, eh?” Thomas pulled back to examine Jimmy’s face. “It’ll be alright, Jimmy.”</p>
<p>“You shouldn’t be sayin’ that,” Jimmy sniffed. “I’m meant to be the one holdin’ <em>you</em> and tellin’ <em>you</em> that everything’ll be alright.”</p>
<p>Thomas smiled. It was what Jimmy would later dub his <em>oh, my sweet boy</em> smile. Jimmy’s personal favourite. “We can take turns,” Thomas said softly. And they would. They fell asleep like that, tangled in each other, with the lamp still on.</p>
<p>There would be nightmares as well as kisses in a big-enough bed piled impractically high with pillows, none of them lumpy. There would be lingering embraces from behind while cold, trembling hands were warmed over the stove. There would be arguments over ‘stashing the bleedin' peppercorns in tall-people land, Thomas, I swear…’ and, in the beginning at least, over ‘you know you’re <em>like that</em> as well Jimmy, you live with a man for fuck’s sake!’ Days would come, especially in winter, when Thomas would get a look in his eyes. The one that told Jimmy not to be cross about the dirty mugs left lying around, and to check in on the manager’s office every chance he got. Nights would come when Jimmy sat at the piano, chasing something that he could almost feel, just behind his heart. Nights when even after Thomas gently led him away from the keys and put him to bed, that he <em>reached</em>. There would be times, in those first few years, when the ill-gotten knowledge they had of each other bubbled up and boiled over, piece by piece, until no secrets remained.</p>
<p>But there would also be long nights of shared labour and shorter ones of drunken revelry in the downstairs bar. There would be friends and compatriots and red-mouthed smiles that came more easily for having them. Holidays by the seaside and visits from the children (after much begging and rending of garments, so Mary informed them) would come with the summer breeze. Once both at the same time when Sybbie got old enough to ‘borrow’ the car, much to the detriment of George’s digestion. Not to mention the detriment to her father’s nerves when he found the perfectly-polite-and-reasonable note she left. There would be a long succession of cats, all of which Thomas vehemently opposed before falling hopelessly in love with them. There would be walks in the parks and meals in restaurants and mornings and evenings and afternoons.</p>
<p>There would even be rings kept on a watch-chain and under a glove, despite Jimmy’s loud and unconvincing insistence that Thomas was a ‘soppy old git’ for it. Thomas wasn’t the one who ran his fingertip along the inside, murmuring the engraved words like a mantra, even after decades of the habit rendered them illegible. It didn’t matter that no one else could understand them, for they existed just the same: <em>Contra mundum.</em> Always.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Thomas' Song (Reprise)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Jimmy walked down the path, leaning heavily on his cane and hoping it didn’t fly out from under him in the slick April mud. It had rained the day before, but the sun was properly out now and the world was finally warming up. The stone he headed towards stood out from its fellows, not in size or extravagance of the monument itself, but rather for the collection of offerings around its base. In addition to the common-enough bouquet of hyacinths there were several bells, a small stone dish, seashells, and a star-shaped Christmas ornament courtesy of little Sophie who lived next door. Jimmy was still shocked no one had run off with that one.  </p>
<p>“Hello darlin’. Brought you fresh ones, this lot’ve made a right mess.” He leant against the headstone to pick up the ruined blooms and replace them with white gardenias. “I heard this new song on the radio and it made me think of that time…Christ, the war must’ve just ended, you remember when…” he nattered on, fussing around the grave. It was a well-worn habit by now, one he had been practising for exactly a year. He had told Thomas everything for about half a century. There was no sense in stopping now. When he was satisfied that everything was sufficiently tidy and had disposed of the hyacinths, he placed two cigarettes between his lips. He was silent while he lit them with a battered old lighter and balanced one on the edge of the dish. It was the only time he smoked, these days.</p>
<p>“I miss you,” he murmured. “Feels like I’m just trailing off, sometimes. I keep doin’ things like you’re here. Still buy things I don’t even like to eat an’ all.”</p>
<p>Visitors to Jimmy’s flat knew better than to comment on the spare glove that still lived on the hat stand, or the grey overcoat beneath it. They confined themselves to sighing a little in sympathy when he poured an extra cup of tea or measure of whiskey that would go unconsumed. No one understood, not really. At least the funeral home hadn’t questioned the silver coin placed under the late Mr. Thomas Barrow’s tongue.</p>
<p>By the time his cigarette was finished there was a dull pain in his back from standing too long on uneven ground. He butted both cigs out in the dish and pressed a kiss to the cool stone. “Love ya,” he said softly. “I can’t believe it’s been a year.”</p>
<p>Jimmy nursed a headache on the bus ride home. Rummaging through his pockets for painkillers proved unsuccessful, so his only option was to try distracting himself. He tapped his fingers against his thighs and hummed softly, going from the Rolling Stones to Cab Calloway to Elgar in his absentmindedness. It made him feel more in control, sitting with his imaginary piano across his knees. Until, that is, his fingers moved into a different tune, unfamiliar and achingly familiar all at once. He stopped, frozen in a chord as his street was called. Surely he couldn’t be home already.</p>
<p>“You alright there, gramps?” a long-haired young man asked, looking at him askance.</p>
<p>“I think I might be,” Jimmy muttered, shuffling off as quickly as he could manage.</p>
<p>Either the world had sped up or he had become unnaturally slow. He felt like he was moving through syrup, but at the same time walking a high wire. He had to balance. <em>He had a job to do.</em></p>
<p>“What?” he said aloud. His head pounded.</p>
<p>The journey to his front door took an eternity and no time at all. He stumbled into the flat, stepping on the post. Which was odd. There shouldn’t have been post between now and this morning. It was this bloody headache, making him confused. Thomas had been confused, sometimes, near the end. About what day it was, or what year, or the particular identity of the neighbour’s daughter. He never forgot Jimmy, though. And now everything reminded Jimmy of him. The rocking chair by the grandfather clock was Thomas’ chair. It was Thomas’ clock, too, though Jimmy kept it running perfectly in his absence. The kitchen was haunted by an old man making tea, the sofa by a younger man reading poetry aloud. The television was the one that Thomas had examined with a raised brow over the morning paper as Jimmy enthusiastically set it up. The rug was the one that muffled their steps when they danced, to jazz and blues and rock and roll.</p>
<p>How the hell was it already dark?</p>
<p>Jimmy shook himself and flicked the lights on. He had an itch. A deep, implacable, painful itch. The kind that forced him out of bed in the middle of the night, or made his servant’s blank slip. He knew what was happening before he sat down at the piano. The same piano where he had softly played Liszt for a man who couldn’t sleep so many times. So many years. He didn’t notice that the grandfather clock stopped as soon as he arranged his hands.</p>
<p>His fingers moved effortlessly, as if they had never forgotten. It seemed absurd, in that moment, that he could forget the music written on his soul. They could never be parted, him and this melody. It might be obscured, but it could never be scratched out. It flowed from him perfectly, rising and falling like the tide. And when he got to the end, the resolution was there. Just as simple. Just as obvious.</p>
<p>Jimmy never felt the side of his face hit the keys. He never heard little Sophie cry when her parents gently explained that Mr. Kent had an Anne-your-is-’em, and that he was with his friend Mr. Barrow now. He only knew that the pain behind his eyes, in his whole body, was gone, and that he stood in soft, white sand. The breeze in his hair carried the sound of chimes.</p>
<p>“One wondered when one might see you again.”</p>
<p>Jimmy pulled the coin out of his mouth. “Promise I won’t cause a fuss this time.”</p>
<p>“What a pity. One so seldom gets to witness a fuss.”</p>
<p>The other side of the river grew wild with rushes and willows that dipped their long, golden hair in the water. No mist obscured their forms, nor the rolling fields beyond.</p>
<p>“It’s awfully different,” Jimmy said.</p>
<p>“One finds it looks the same. You, however, are quite different, no-longer-living-man.”</p>
<p>When he stepped off the barge with a goodbye to the Ferryman, his feet knew exactly which way to go. He took it slowly, letting his fingers trail through the long grass dotted with bachelor buttons. It was exactly the kind of sky above that Thomas liked best: golden afternoon sunlight slanting down on the hedgerows, turning leaves to gold and silver and making the clouds blush. Thomas had never said as much. He never had to.</p>
<p>Children ran across the path, throwing a ball back and forth over the head of a scruffy dog. Jimmy knew, like an itch, that there was another dog not far away, walking with its lonely master beneath the poplars. He also knew that a woman waited in a garden, while her husband pretended to be very busy in the house. He would see her soon. But first things first.</p>
<p>He clambered over a tumbled-down stone wall and stepped on sand. Gulls cried in the distance, wheeling above the waves. It was almost Brighton, he realized, if Brighton were completely empty on a fine, sunny day. Well, not quite empty. One figure sprawled on a towel in his shirtsleeves, staring pensively out to sea.</p>
<p>“You don’t even like the beach.”</p>
<p>Thomas jerked his head around, black hair resting loose against his forehead. His face broke into that perfect, open smile. The rarest one of all. “But you do,” he said softly. His brow furrowed, a gentle sadness coming over him. “You didn’t take your time.”</p>
<p>“I know what I promised, love. I didn’t rush,” Jimmy assured him. He flopped down beside him, taking an ungloved hand in his own. It was solid and warm beneath his fingers. </p>
<p>The grasses and the ocean whispered and hummed and roared, a rhythm found in the crash of the waves. They resolved themselves into a melody, starting slow and disjointed, and then clearer, fuller, it wove back and forth in the breathing of the world.</p>
<p>“Do you hear it?” Jimmy whispered.</p>
<p>Thomas nodded. “I s’pose I can enjoy it properly, now it doesn’t make me miss you anymore.”</p>
<p>Jimmy smoothed back his lover’s hair, only to have it stubbornly fall right back where it was. “Soppy old git.” He smiled, his grin mirrored on red lips that tasted of cigarettes and oranges.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>And she's done. Thank you to everyone who has been following along, and to everyone who will read this in the future. I will probably do some cover art for it at some point :)</p>
<p>Should you feel the overwhelming need to yell at me across platforms, I'm now also at the-lake-king.tumblr.com.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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